Everything Dies, and That's the Good News

"Why do you think you're so cautious about getting into serious relationships?"

I've been dating a new girl, and that's a question you really DON'T want to hear three or four weeks into something.

The night was warm, and we were sitting barefoot, side-by-side on Nina's back porch. She was smoking a clove and I was looking at the moonlight through the trees. There wasn't even a hint of a breeze. Her little back walk was hemmed in by tall bushes and what in the darkness could have been mangolias. The porch was cramped and our elbows brushed as we talked, softly, slowly.

"I think, if I really committed to something and we broke up, I'd feel like a failure."

"But I don't understand. It takes two people to make a relationship work. Why would it be your failure?"

"Well if the girl cheated on me, I could probalby blame her."

"No, I mean, why does it have be somebody's fault? Everything ends, that's what you learn in Buddhism. That's why – and I don't always agree with this – that's why Buddhists say not to get attached to people or things. Because everyone dies, everything fades away."

"I don't want things to fade away," I said, thinking of the lake house, and friends I've lost, unrequited loves, and death... stalking closer than she knew. "You know that feeling you have when you're a child? That everything will always be just like it is now? That sense of perpetuity? I want that."

"Yeah, I understand, but Buddhists will say that's the good news too. That suffering doesn't last forever either. It comes to an end too."

It reminded me of that line from Atlantic City by the Boss:

Everything dies, baby, that's a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

It's a song about hopelessness, about how crazy it is to hope, but also about how we can't STOP hoping. How hope makes us throw good money after bad. How we stake everything, hoping to win, hoping for a chance of something we know can't last...

...and that suffering might end.

It's stupid, I know. But it's already made me take some risks, chasing that long lost memory of perpetuity...