Everything ends, yet life does not. Every attachment, every feeling, every moment that once felt immovable, eventually softens and slips away. It’s not sudden, not loud, but slow and quiet. We barely notice when something starts to fade. One day we just realise that it has.
What we call ‘attachments’ are brief comforts. They hold us, then let us go. What we think we will remember forever, we don’t. Memory itself is not a safe house. It forgets, and in forgetting, it carries us forward. That forgetting is not a weakness. It’s how we survive. The past, once vivid, turns into faint outlines. Its weight lifts and drifts away. What once shaped us becomes background noise.
Still, when one thing ends, something else quietly begins. Not in neat lines, but in strange, uneasy rhythm. Life does not move forward like a song, it stumbles like a thought. Structure and chaos sit next to each other. One becomes the other when you look away. And the shifts we notice, they aren’t cracks, they’re more like gentle nudges. Life does not shout. It whispers.
Even life itself is not permanent. But it doesn’t disappear. It changes shape. The river joins the ocean, but the water remains. So much changes, but something always stays, even if it looks nothing like before. A person goes, but something of them lingers. A home is left, but the feeling of its warmth hides in other places. Nothing is kept, but nothing is truly lost either.
If everything is temporary, then what do we hold onto? That question has followed me. I try to answer it, but it moves as I move. Still, I ask; again and again. Why do people do things that are, by their very nature, temporary? Why do they love like it will last forever, when they know it won’t? Why do they betray, lie, chase power, make promises, and build empires of sand? Why do they do anything at all, if they know it won’t remain?
It’s not that they don’t know. Maybe they do. Maybe they feel the passing of things more than they admit. And maybe they act not because they’re unaware of temporariness, but because they are. And that knowing becomes unbearable. So they create noise. They act out of fear. Or maybe hope. Or maybe just habit.
Some people destroy what they cannot hold. Others hold tighter, hoping it’ll stay. Some write, some forget, some run. But deep down, it’s all the same: a refusal to sit still in the face of fading. Maybe it’s brave. Maybe it’s foolish. I don’t know. But I can’t judge them. I’ve done the same. We all have.
Still, there’s another way. Not to run from impermanence, not to fight it, but to sit with it. To know something will end, and yet love it. To know a moment will go, and yet live it. Not to escape change, but to stay present while it happens. And in that presence, maybe, there is something real. Not eternal, but real enough.
I’ve tried to make sense of this. But the more I write, the more the question slips away. And oddly, that brings me some comfort. The act of writing – putting my confusion into words – is enough for now. It doesn’t solve anything, but it softens the noise in my head; just a little.
In the end, I come back to the same place. Nothing stays. Not people. Not places. Not even thoughts. Life moves on. We leave things behind, even when we don’t mean to. And we keep looking for something new, even when we’re tired. Always searching, always moving. And maybe that’s what it means to be alive – to live inside the passing, not in spite of it.
Even things that vanish can still matter. Even what ends can leave warmth. That’s enough, I think.
