Mortality has been a pillar of my thought as of late, years now. The feeling, ever so surely and persistently, of even one's self looking on with the Others, from some position a great distance of comfort. Words become an unmentionable loneliness. Time's Arrow points inward on itself, and there is the constant withdrawal from all and everything save what the Sun's rays miss. And I miss her dearly. We all do. Not only for the beauty I once witnessed, or the silliness in our hopeful wonderings, but for the mere fact of her existence, something no God could contest. Our words about things are quite inert if the face bears no gate to a feeling.
Her presence was faithfully genuine, always and everywhere I might contact her from my periphery. The whole lot of her language merrily drove through the deepest parts of my intellect, journeys my passenger lively lived. My ideas were given strength and vantage atop the territory of her unquestionable creativity of thought and integrity of spirit. Yet I must pass on, into a world, where those stretches to my concept of mortality must clear, and the contraction of my notion must yield to the realities making their gifts before me. Each person is new and not some vestige of a component chaos. These new faces will shine or scowl before any event of my partaking, teem with expression or exact a null tonality for which humanity is wholly competent, blending the texture of emotion into the regular economy of the human condition.
Hope was cleverly tucked away beneath the deeps of this world-garden, and I might have lost the tools of discovery had I not taken a blessing from the structures of Today. Quite simply: this day — like the ones before, but unto itself. A whole day filled with people who cultivate the smile, who engender a new formative and imminent grace, who arm themselves with compassion and care. Might the capital of love and excellence outweigh the dread of a stilted past. So it is said: "A word aptly spoken is like an apple of gold within a picture of silver."
In memory shall you rest, Brittany Nicole Keele. Pass as you may as antidote to their Heaven.