the noticing

in

It’s such a strange thought - that all good things must end.  Such a common thing to say, and to hear. But maybe it’s not true.  Maybe we just confuse the good things with magic things.

Magic is fireworks.  It’s the thrill of mischief and it shines and fills you with the addictive fear of tearing yourself away in case you should miss a single second.  Your eyes reflect its light with stars and you’re hypnotized. Frozen in a moving place. It’s more beautiful than the last time, you would put your life on it.  But then, inevitable and at all once, it ends and all that’s left is the smoke that stings your open eyes. Smoke and a bad smell.

From the moment the match kisses the fuse, we can feel its end racing closer and closer.  The panic, the fearful hunger with which we devour every explosion, anticipating the peak of the high and terrified of the immediate come down.

That’s magic.  I’ve known it.

But good things, truly good things, are there right behind us, patiently waiting for us to notice them again.  Good things are lazy clouds floating across a too hot summer sky that we forget to thank for their shade. We stop one day to rest under their billowing, whimsical dances and suddenly, it’s like we’ve fallen in love again.  We’re seven years old again, barefoot and life is slow and we notice everything. We notice again.

The good things are when you have nowhere to be and a slow wake up to forehead kisses in sleepy arms and a barely awake ‘i dreamt about you’.  This isn’t magic and you know it because it stays and it keeps you warm and you forget to thank it for being good.

There is beauty in the still.  Love is found in gentle mornings with blankets kicked to the side.  Respite is laughing into a kiss. Bliss is comfortable silence and a smile from across the table.  Real magic is noticing when these truly good moments wrap you in their own little infinity.

If perhaps,  we immersed ourselves in these patient good things as desperately and hungrily as we did the fleeting magic, then perhaps, at the end, we’d discover even more warmth and even more good waiting just as patiently for us to pay notice.