Expiration Dates

by Rebecca Serle

I do miss the thing I don’t have. It’s strange to feel that, to want something that you’ve never even known before. But that’s love, isn’t it? The belief in something you cannot see or touch or even explain. Like the heart itself, we just know it’s there.

It’s hard to hold on to people the older we get. Life looks different for everyone, and you have to keep choosing one another. You have to make a conscious effort to say, over and over again, “You.” Not everyone makes that choice. Not everyone can.

I have information you don’t, I thought often. From that hospital room I could almost hear the cosmic whisper: So do I.

I often wonder what our responsibility is to other people, how much we owe them. Whose job is it to look out for our own happiness. Us, or the people who love us? It’s both, of course. We owe ourselves and each other. But in what order?

About once a year I cry about the fact that I’ll never know what he looked like as a puppy.

We have to be cracked open sometimes. We have to be cracked open sometimes to let anything good in. What I see now, emerging in the mirror, is this one, simple truth: learning to be broken is learning to be whole.

But being surprised by life isn’t losing, it’s living. It’s messy and uncomfortable and complicated and beautiful.

We are powerful because we affect each other’s stories, all of us. We are here to impact each other, to knock into each other, to throw each other off-balance, sometimes even off track.