A LOT of things in this world are temporary: baby teeth, hair ties, clothes, money, laughter, smiles, people, pain, and sometimes, unfortunately, love.
In a fast-changing world where times stops for no man, most of us are used to seeing things and people come and go. And although a lot of us would lie and say we aren’t hurt because we’re already used to it, no amount of lies could ever cover up the pain in our eyes. No amount of lies could ever cloud the truth – the truth that the temporariness of things kills us in the inside more than all the scrapes on the knee, cuts on the hand, and wounds on the skin in the entire world combined.
These are truths that we are scared of time – for time takes away everything just as fast as he gives us everything. For time changes his mind every so often like how he changes the position of his second hand. Time is a merciless man who never steps back to reach out to those who try to love him. Time is a heartless man who is lucky enough to never have loved and never been left.
But time is also the miserable man who is cursed to never have loved enough. He has never loved her enough to make him want her to stay. He has never loved her enough to make himself see that she was worth stopping his hands for. He has never loved her enough to erase the possibility of the existence of the word “temporary.” He has never loved her enough to make her love him the same way she loved asking him to give away more hours. He has never loved her enough to make her love him the same way she loved asking him to take away more minutes. He has never loved her enough to make her love him more than she feared him. He has never loved her enough.
Time never loved pain enough for her to love him, too.
But love is just as miserable as time. Love is just as cursed as time. For the man that she loves doesn’t stay in her arms as long as she wants him to hold on to her. For the man that she loves disappears, leaving her with nothing but scars, questions of “what if’s and could’ve been’s” and memories of the last seconds. But even though she is left with memories of how each second with him felt, she still chooses to love the seconds he makes without her.
For love fulfills her promise to love him with a love that not even the greatest extent of temporariness could ever conjure; love fulfills her promise to love him with a love that not even all the hands of the clocks in the entire world could ever forego.
Love fulfills her promise to love him with a love that does not fear time. Love chose to love time with a love that did not fear of losing him and his seconds. (Jo Antonette M. Cañete/Corpus Christi School)