entropy in the spaces i no longer occupy
i have spent an unreasonable amount of my life trying to negotiate with things that were already changing.
i wanted people to remain recognizable, memories to retain their original meaning, and certain versions of myself to stay within reach. i thought that if i paid enough attention, understood enough, anticipated enough, i could somehow soften the impact of time. as if awareness could function as a kind of insurance against loss.
but life does not wait for me to finish understanding it.
people become strangers while i am still remembering how they used to make me feel. old ambitions lose their gravity. things i once considered essential become difficult to explain to the person i am now. sometimes, i discover that i have outgrown something only after spending months trying to convince myself that i still belong there.
i used to interpret these changes as evidence that something had gone wrong. now, i wonder whether i was simply expecting a temporary arrangement to behave like a permanent one.
this is what draws me to entropy. not the simplistic idea that everything falls apart, but the unsettling recognition that the present state of anything is not a guarantee of what it will become. in physics, entropy belongs to a precise set of principles; in my life, it has become a language for thinking about change without immediately assigning it the meaning of failure.
i think i have been grieving the loss of permanence more than the loss of particular things.
i still catch myself trying to preserve what has already changed. i revisit old conversations, reconstruct abandoned possibilities, and wonder whether a different decision might have allowed a different version of my life to survive. but even if i could return to those moments, i would arrive carrying everything that happened afterward. there is no returning to a past without bringing the present into it.
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and perhaps that is the part i have been reluctant to accept: i cannot go backward without changing what backward means.
so i am trying to live differently. not by caring less, but by spending less of my life preparing for the disappearance of what i care about. i want to experience people as they are, rather than as memories i might someday have to make peace with. i want to let myself change without treating every departure from my former identity as a betrayal.
i may never become entirely comfortable with impermanence. there will probably always be things i wish had lasted longer, people i remember differently than they remember me, and versions of myself i will never fully understand.
but i no longer want the fear of losing something to become the primary way i experience having it.
perhaps growing up is not learning how to let go gracefully. perhaps it is realizing that life was never asking me to preserve every version of it.
i am not the person who began these words, and by the time i return to them, i will have changed again.
for once, i do not want to treat that as a problem to solve.
i want to stop asking life to remain recognizable long enough for me to understand it.
visual art: artist and title currently unidentified. original source unverified.
