Mientras estuvimos aquí (For a Little While)

Everything is temporary.

Some things stay long enough to make us forget.

They become part of the background of our lives, so constant and familiar that we mistake their presence for permanence.

We stop noticing the way they hold us together.

Until something changes.

Sometimes it happens all at once.

Sometimes so quietly that we cannot name what has been lost, only that the world no longer feels the way it did before.

An emptiness appears where there used to be certainty.

A distance opens inside something that is still there.

The familiar becomes unfamiliar, and we are left trying to understand how something can remain and disappear at the same time.

Perhaps that is the strange cruelty of being alive.

Everything we love is already moving through time.

Toward change.

Toward distance.

Toward an ending we cannot see yet.

Some things are given to us for years.

Others for only a moment.

Some leave completely.

Others remain close enough to touch, but no longer belong to us in the same way.

And still, the heart keeps reaching for what it remembers.

It looks for old shapes in newly empty spaces.

It returns to doors that no longer open the same way.

It keeps loving versions of things that time has already carried away.

Lately, I have felt surrounded by endings I cannot fully name.

Not one great collapse, but a quiet accumulation. A little less here. A little more distance there. The slow realization that life can change without asking whether we are ready.

I am learning that grief does not always arrive after something is gone. Sometimes it begins while we are still holding on. Sometimes it is the feeling of time passing through our hands and knowing there is nothing we can do to close our fingers around it.

So I am learning to live among the temporary.

Not gracefully.

Not without fear.

Not without wishing I could make certain moments stay exactly where they were.

Some days, living is only enduring the space between what was and whatever comes next.

It is waking up inside a life that feels slightly rearranged.

It is carrying love after it has lost its place to go.

It is discovering that loneliness can exist even when we are not alone.

It is continuing without yet understanding what continuing is supposed to mean.

Maybe nothing was ever meant to be kept.

Maybe we are only asked to be present while it is here.

To notice the warmth before it becomes memory.

To recognize happiness before hindsight gives it a name.

To love without confusing love with ownership.

To let something matter even when it cannot promise us forever.

I used to think the ending changed the meaning of everything that came before it.

Now I am trying to believe that it does not.

What was real remains real, even when it is no longer ours.

What changed us remains within us, even after its shape is gone.

What we loved does not become meaningless simply because time continued.

Everything is temporary.

The fullness.

The absence.

The closeness.

The distance.

Even this version of me, standing among all that has changed, wondering how to keep living inside it.

Some things stay a little longer.

Some leave a little sooner.

And perhaps learning to live is learning to stop measuring a thing by how long it stayed.

Perhaps it is enough that, for a little while, it was here.

And so was I.