Annotations
these are not tears of mourning, of sadness, but rather a not-so-secret third thing. i’ve been crying at the beauty of the everyday.
i thought about the person on the other side of the screen and what could have motivated them to be so hostile to scam strangers for a living. then i burst into tears — not for the act of being scammed, but for the sheer amount of empathy i had for someone who did me unbelievably wrong and who would feel zero remorse. i was just another person that fell for their trick and they would continue each day taking advantage of random strangers’ trust. what could provoke someone to do this? what cruelty must they have faced in order to end up in this situation? people are born good. if this was not true, civilization would not exist as we know it today. the goodness of humans and our care for one another is testament to our survival thus far.
he shares how his wife of 58 years had passed last year. how she had, on her death bed, told him to keep on living. how his grandchildren played blackbird at her funeral. how they started dating at 16. how they had spent over 600 days on cruise ships together, hundreds of days travelling in a caravan across europe, and he had counted every single day they spent together. and lastly, how he was returning from a coast-to-coast canada train trip to an empty home he had never seen empty before.
i ask him about the secret sauce of being with one person for his whole life and if the love they shared ever diminished. he responds that he never even had a second thought about it. love was second nature to his life with her. everyday was meaningful when they were together.
a life prior to love is a life of blindness. a loveless life inhibits the opportunity to have a reaction, let alone a chance to accelerate it. it is a grand thing to care about anything and everything, and a humbling one at that.