It’s Jagged, Raw and Real…It Hurts

I sobbed.

I couldn’t get it off my mind for weeks and the tears would well up in my eyes and eventually cascade over onto my cheeks.

I’ve done what she did…what am I saying, I am doing it still.

Not as often any more and I’m going back to try and undo what I’ve done in the past.

It has been years since the first time I received this in an email. Now I have received it again. I think it was supposed to come popping into my account…”You’ve Got Mail” that familiar voice echoed in my office.

I was especially quiet and reflective anyway. That one email changed my day…

Again.

Maybe I am just a very emphathetic individual. I know I’m extremely visual. Intense words float into my mind and create images that attach to my heart. That’s when I lose the control. My soul grasps the emotions which lie so precariously on the edge of my heart. The feeling is deep and engulfs all rational thinking that could keep me detached.

I know after the first line how the short paragraphs will end. Yet, I can’t make myself tear my eyes from the words…

“A friend of mine opened his wife’s underwear drawer and picked up a silk paper wrapped package:

‘This,’ he said, ‘isn’t any ordinary package.’

He unwrapped the box and stared at both the silk paper and the box.

‘She got this the first time we went to New York, eight or nine years ago. She has never put it on because she was saving it for a special occasion.

Well, I guess this is it.

He got near the bed and placed the gift box next to the other clothing he was taking to the funeral home. His wife had just died.

He turned to me and said:

‘Never save something for a special occasion.

Every day in your life is a special occasion’.

I still think those words changed my life.

Now I read more and clean less.

I sit on the porch without worrying about anything.

I spend more time with my family, and less at work.

I understood that life should be a source of experience to be lived up to, not survived through.

I no longer keep anything.

I use crystal glasses every day…

I’ll wear new clothes to go to the supermarket, if I feel like it.

I don’t save my special perfume for special occasions, I use it whenever I want to.

The words ‘Someday…’ and ‘ One Day…’ are fading away from my dictionary.

If it’s worth seeing, listening or doing, I want to see, listen or do it now…

I don’t know what my friend’s wife would have done if she knew she wouldn’t be there the next morning, this nobody can tell.

I think she might have called her relatives and closest friends.

She might call old friends to make peace over past quarrels.

I’d like to think she would go out for Chinese, her favourite food.

It’s these small things that I would regret not doing, if I knew my time had come..

Each day, each hour, each minute, is special.

Live for today, for tomorrow is promised to no-one.”

Now I have read it again.

I can smell the potpourri in the clothes drawer. I can see his eyes misty with sadness. I feel his pain.

I don’t want to regret. I don’t want to let the moments pass without saying what I really need to say or experiencing the joy in every moment.

I’m not going to save “things” any more. I’m not going to “wait” for a better opportunity to tell someone how much they mean to me. Life is too short and just keeps getting shorter. I’m not wasting my opportunities again.