The present instant keeps slipping away, leaving the past fixed and the future insecure, which either recede beyond awareness or approach within grasp. For now, two strangers encountered each other on a busy sidewalk in an eastern US city for a split second. A common phenomenon on crowded city sidewalks. Both immediately became incidents in the past for each other. The present moment tumbled from their consciousness, and they marched to their respective futures only to feel a mysterious pull! Soon after they left the crossroads, an acute sensation of a cosmic desire to gently hold hands or wrap an arm around the shoulder to walk each other home flared in their hearts. Where did this emotion drop from? They wondered! A decisive impulse made both turn around quickly, and they headed to rediscover each other in the sea of a crowd. As if they were toddlers, enthralled to pick up something mesmerizing from the ground! In a blink, immediately after recollecting each other, a twisted route through mysteries and toward where they both must travel begins. They are entirely unaware of the spell. But their journey begins without a grand plan or the warmth of a quilt stitched with great hopes and dreams. Their expedition starts spontaneously with zest but is shrouded in a puzzle.
For an exceptionally lucky few, this unexpected meeting of the unknowns could be lifelong, coasting along a shoreline of life while both collect pearls of memories. Until! The shared trip is interrupted when one of the companions inescapably runs out of the allotted time when breath becomes air. There is no escaping from a roll of the dice of fate, and it always ends abruptly for the fellow companion.
The other must reconstruct a different course to continue; it’s been in their pursuits and prayers since the bonds of building a nest in each other’s souls began. Moment by moment, they conditioned hearts that, however unexpected, the sudden end of their togetherness is mere transience. They made peace with this awareness; otherwise, they would have been in a never-ending race away from their shadows. An eventuality of significant loss. Still, the resonance of despair stays relentless and only becomes numb from the strength of a faint hope, unspoken yet snuggled in the heart like a thin spider thread. A persistent plea made in silence to the unseen, to the all-merciful: their rendezvous would be extended compared to what was only at the confluence during the shared journey. The desperation to confirm if their prayers have been accepted will always remain a mystery to them and the rest of us. For now, they must compose a narrative that the terms of encounter will transition into another realm, which scientists call “the conservation of energy.” Assurance that their lives would not perish into oblivion. In that imaginative domain, they would meet again to settle into their home—the home nestled in what they had always imagined as their destination. A belief that all parting is only transitory in time is an elixir for the anxious heart.