Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
"...if I could make it stay..."
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2009 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Hugo Schwyzer today posted a short poem that struck me, "One of the Butterflies" by W.S. Merwin. When you're Surprised By Joy(TM) it passes through you, and you're always everlastingly too late to cherish that moment. Mark Twain said he could live on a good compliment for three weeks; to me, the joy of a compliment is like a dish of ice cream in front of me. I can't stop myself from eating it all as fast as I can, and then it's gone. I get terrible mileage. All I'm left with is the empty bowl, the wish to feel that way again.
Those memories I most love won't be stewarded; they slip through my fingers like last week's dreams; they leak out the holes of my Pensieve faster the harder I press on them.
One wonderful thing about being with Leonard is that every day we're together, there's some small moment when we look at each other and our eyes soften and we smile and think, I am so lucky. I love you. You make me happy. We often say it, but sometimes we don't have to. Entropy falleth on the just and the unjust alike, the sieve empties gracelessly, but love keeps falling in, and sometimes even the sieve overflows. Love is a renewable resource.
