sol.ace_r

As you live, there are things in your heart whose endings you never quite decide.
Feelings that are awkward to name with a clear “how long,” kinds of waiting you can’t be sure of yet still can’t easily let go.
I know the strange warmth that kind of ambiguity carries.

It’s the same when you think of someone.
“How long will I like them?”, “How long will I wait for their message?”, “How long will this feeling last?”
The questions keep coming, but there is almost never a need to decide the answers right now.
Human emotions always arrive a little late, and endings always come without notice.

Some feelings last a long time, and others disappear quickly.
But if we could know the difference in advance, we would probably become much more indifferent beings.
No one loves knowing there is a fixed expiration date.
There is only a heart that begins while holding a vague sense that it might last a long time.

Everyday questions are similar.
How long can I keep living like this, how long can I hold onto where I am now, how long can I endure without disappointing myself.
These unanswered worries can feel overwhelming at times, but once a day passes, it somehow connects to the next.
Most “how longs” drift by in this vagueness, and within that flow, we grow a little stronger.

Lately, I’ve come to think that the phrase “how long” sounds like a question about the end, but is actually born from a desire to hold onto the present a bit longer.
People don’t want to lose what is truly precious, so they keep checking where the end might be.
It looks like a gesture toward certainty, but in truth it’s a very human movement, made of anxiety and love mixed together.

Sometimes I think this.
That it’s okay not to decide a “how long.”
That letting your heart go as far as it naturally reaches isn’t such a bad way to live.
For feelings, for relationships, for life itself, 
we learn over time that fixed deadlines never really existed in the first place.

And in the end, this is what remains.
The sense that you are fully living this moment.
If you have that feeling, you don’t have to rush to answer the question of “how long.”