If time wasn’t linear and life was an orbit, pain couldn’t make me old and age wouldn’t sound morbid. I’d know every ending would only bring pause; that birth was just as relevant as any loss. I’d know eyes are subjective, and the mind is a trap disfiguring reality like a folded map. Doubt will provide distance like a neighbor’s fence as pictures and frames attempt to capture innocence. And love is the answer that will set you free, unless you’re a hostage in its captivity: begging for release or at least a transfer like the sweetest memory too painful to remember. But life lasts longer than the gifts we have to give and it’s not about what’s lost, but what you can’t live with that ultimately will dictate the silence and the sorrow; that leaves you grieving yesterday and dismissing tomorrow. You followed the rules; you kept your hands to yourself. But you’re the one person you never knew how to help. You say people are leaves: they change color and fall, and just before their death, they’re the center of it all - the years of emotion that finally surface, and, in a brief moment, give those years purpose. And we mourn a death or a life is celebrated. And we rot in the ground or we’re reincarnated. The weak and compassionate struggle to move on as a cycle returns to its origin and time moves along. Two generations later, bones lay in a coffin beneath an engraved stone that’s nearly forgotten.