All will pass, will end too fast, you know

[So I woke up today to the sound of the alarm blaring, and a reminder on my phone that today's the anniversary of our first meeting, because of course this is an old reminder on an old backup of an old phone, and it'd obviously pop up today, though I don't think I actually remembered the date at all. But I do remember that first day, tentative, testy, tetchy, the both of us. Fourteen long years ago, and yet it doesn't seem an enough number of years, because I feel I've lived at least two full lifetimes since then. Had we known what we'd come to know, I wonder, would we have called it quits then and there?]

                                  (You're the truth, not I.)                                             

And then, because these things tend to be somehow linked, I woke up with a melody in my head. Not a familiar one, but one I knew I had listened to before - but where? when? I tried to hum it, and it hung there, just at the edge of recognition. I couldn't put words to the melody, so I began to realize that maybe this was something instrumental rather than vocal. I had this faint idea of a melancholy tune, and a part of me knew that this had been played to me in a somewhat intimate setting - somewhere with very few people. An image of people sitting around a table, all eyes on a lone figure came to my mind. I can't now remember the person's name, and I highly doubt that I memorized it at all, but in my mind's eye this moment was relived in full detail. Sometime in early 2000, I had been living in London for a few months, and feeling wholly miserable the whole time. I missed home, missed my family, missed my friends... and I hated both my work and one of the people I lived with. There were very few moments of joy back then, especially in this particular moment in time.
But there was this one day where me and this couple I lived with went to visit some of their friends at their place, themselves having moved to London a few years back, and this proved to be a great moment of home away from home, and a completely unexpected one at that. Besides the familiarity of listening to your own language again - though I did listen to it daily, but only from the same two people - it also helped that we were treated to some very good traditional cooking, with some very fine wine to go with it. Something I realized early was that I was the youngest person there, aside from the children, and because my own son was still very wee - and very far away - this did leave me far more emotional than I would've expected. At the end of the evening, as we all huddled 'round that table, a strong drink in hand, listening to stories of old, seemingly out of nowhere an accordion was produced. And this nameless figure that played this most melancholic of songs, wrought tears straight from our very souls; not an eye in that room remained dry as the notes swirled around us, tugging deeply at our heartstrings. What song this was I never knew, nor will I ever. I just look at it as the soundtrack to a happy moment, twenty years ago.

And that's the end and that's the start of it

  that's the whole and that's the part of it

 that's the high and that's the heart of it

 that's the long and that's the short of i

that's the best and that's the test in it

 that's the doubt, the doubt, the trust in it

  that's the sight and that's the sound of it

  that's the gift and that's the trick in it.

Twenty years ago, that boy that sat at that table, looked so much like this man I am now. Oh, a lot less gray haired, to be sure, and my heart and mind not yet as broken as today. And yet, that distant echo of me still reflects unto this day. I wonder, twenty years hence what reverberation of me will make itself be felt, that of now, or that of that twenty years past? We'll have to see, won't we? After all, there are only twenty years to go.