with me when I leave this world. Does it help you to know this? Understand, Josh, that until I met you, at age thirty, it felt like I had been waiting my whole life for you. Does it help you to know this, too? I’ve always believed in soul mates, in that one person (or maybe two people) who would effortlessly and seamlessly slip into my life and heart as if he had always been there. At ages ten and twelve and fourteen and sixteen and eighteen, I would lie awake at night, wondering where you were at that very moment, the boy who would one day be the man who would be the love of my life, my Mr. Darcy, my tall, dark, and handsome. What can I say? I’ve always been a hopeless romantic.
The truth is that nothing I say or do will help you as much as time. Time, that undefinable thing that marks the passing of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades; that thing that seems to stretch often agonizingly into eternity and yet is also cruelly gone too quickly; that thing that waits and hurries for, and otherwise spares, nothing and no one; that thing that makes us forget, or at the very least blunts, the good and the bad. Remember how Mia was a day overdue, and you, impatient, were freaking out and demanded that I get induced (which I ignored)? Now she’s about to turn eight. In the interim, our faces have aged, imperceptibly in the day-to-day but oh so noticeably when we look back at different moments, as recorded by the photos that do not lie about the passage of time. Time has made you and me forget almost every detail of the night we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, the night we started to fall in love with one another. Was it fifty-eight or sixty degrees? Was it windy as we looked upon the millions of sparkling lights that constitute the Manhattan skyline? What were you wearing?
Time has robbed our minds of those many beautiful and rich details, and for better or worse, it has also robbed us of that unique euphoria of falling in love. The intense excitement and anxiety of falling in love are only memories now, impersonal almost, as if it all happened to somebody else. Sometimes, I wish I could relive those moments, just push a button and for a few glorious minutes travel back in time and be that young, ecstatic woman falling in love with the man of her dreams all over again. But the laws of existence don’t allow that. By the same token, I don’t remember the innumerable fights we’ve had, either, not even the worst ones, in which we threatened divorce. I don’t remember what they were about. I know there were occasions when I was so angry I wanted to smack you in the face, but I can’t make myself feel that rage now. Time cares not that you are the man of my dreams, nor does it care about the most egregious wrongs we have committed against one another; it cares not whether the experiences and emotions were wanted or unwanted, loved or hated; it does not discriminate. Eventually, time dulls everything. It removes the intensity of the purest of joys and the hottest of rages and, yes, even the most heartbreaking of sorrows.
I remember when my grandmother died, when I was twenty; it was the most painful experience of my young life. I remember crying on the flight back to school. I remember crying through my midterms. My family and I (when I was in town) used to go visit her grave site all the time. She who had been the center of our family was sorely missed. But over the years, the visits became less frequent. Weekly visits became monthly and then only on holidays and then annually and then not at all. I haven’t been to her grave site in fifteen years. My life and everyone else’s life continued. We all grew older. We got married. We had our own children. We went on with the business of living.
One day soon, my whole existence, everything that I am and have been to you, will be memory, growing more distant with the passing of each day. One day, you’ll wake up and you won’t remember my face easily anymore. You won’t remember my smell anymore. You won’t remember if I liked chocolate ice