There is only a thin veil separating joy and pain… And as I have become older, I have found that the separation is more and more easily overwhelmed as I am as well at that moment. I find that I am quite often now overrun with a melancholy rush of joy and sadness that come hand in hand and all at once…And most often when I am thinking of the wonderful, crazy days when we were young and together and all of it was out there in the bright light of the mysterious years still ahead of us.
Now as I look back on it, I find my greatest joy and most lovely sadness in the thoughts and memories of our days of golden youth, together. It’s hard to express what my collegiate family still mean to me. Luv them all! We held each other through the fear, love, joy and loss when all those things were still new to us.
I guess I don’t “mourn” my youth, but I do miss it and celebrate the memories. I also know memories are fickle and deceitful. Much of our youth was difficult and painful even then. But we, all of us, the dear tribe of my college days, were good together and there for each other at a time in all of our lives when our only real responsibility was to better ourselves. It is the one time in your life when it is OK that it is all about you and afterward, we owe much to so many. But we were there when we were all we needed.
So now, when I hear that one song, or a breeze moves across my skin in a certain way, or a smell from some long lost memory wafts its way back up and yanks me back to some distant place of a time, long ago… I think of you. And as I do, a salty tear slips across my pursed lips, have smiling, half frozen in that joyful pain of when I was young and all my days were free… And love and loss were memories yet to be.
Why Eye Write 