His voice lingers in my memories, memories that are fading, quietly, into the distance.

My husband’s death holds my attention while the world around me continues to spin.

I desperately try to grab hold, claw my way back to the times that made sense. This time doesn’t make sense anymore, or, perhaps, it makes perfect sense, depending on the way that you look at it.

You see, before he died, I believed in this temporary existence, more than I believed in the unseen realm that continues on forever.

But, now I find myself in the time that exists after he is gone, and that reasoning no longer holds true to my soul.

This temporary, tangible reality seems to carry the same indubitable air as it did before I intimately knew the intricacy of death. Now the idea of this current time holding more weight than where we go next is becoming more and more seemingly absurd as time passes by.

What is beginning to make more sense is that it is all connected.

Our time on earth and the time after we are gone, time being multi-faceted and combining multiple realms. That, perhaps, he is still here, just out of reach, listening to my voice and smiling at the simplicity of the moment.

He is only separated by a line that we cannot see—at least yet.

He is just around the corner, not far from my touch or my voice, waiting until I turn towards the secret place and join him for eternity.

The idea that he was once here, full of the most genuine, electric charismatic energy, and then gone in an instant, leaves me with the absolute certainty that there is no way he is gone forever; his energy is still all around us.

Reminders of our temporary existence are lingering all around me.

During our time here on earth we explore, love, find new paths, discuss the secrets, and then move slowly into the next phase, sometimes without warning or forethought.

These examples are reminding me that it is true, this is all a fleeting time, moments slowly evaporating like the fog that hovers over the river at dawn.

For, if I am not mistaken, my eyes see these current moments taking place and my heart fills with joy as they play out. Then, in an instant they are gone, evaporated into the flow of the river that separates the beginning from the end.

These moments can be so minute, so temporary, that at times I struggle to understand if it is even really happening around me.

And, if it is happening, my mind will frantically search for where these moments are actually going when they are no longer in front of me.

In turn, I can’t help but wonder if the moments are, in actuality, lingering all around me and are, in fact, not disappearing at all. They are still here and begging for attention in a world that is spinning wildly forward with no burden of sensitive insight as to the gravity of what the moments mean to the souls making up our existence.

So, I believe they are still here, lingering all around me.

They must be.

Because, those times, those precious moments that only he and I shared, made up the all encompassing love that radiated out of our skin and was passed on to those around us.

Our temporary existence holding its own eternal realm that will forever carry the electric energy that we all are creating while we are here.

And, so, I will believe in these unseen proposals that I am putting into the world through written thought and intricately woven words that attempt to explain the unexplainable.

I will live a temporary existence that is so full of laughter and tears that it will no doubt fill the soil of this earth and be here for eternity.

Author: Melissa Wilder Joyce

Assistant Editor: Elizabeth Brumfield/ Editor: Travis May

Photo: Amy Treasure/Unsplash