Fade to Black

The sun hits the windowpane, a pure ray of golden light. It catches my eye, and I flinch at its brilliance. Then, through lowered lids, I let the simple, yet cruel spark unfold slowly:

This is it. This moment right here, right now.

This is all we have.

It’s the constant truth beneath everything, the quiet, certain fact that one day the light will fade, the breath will shudder, and the heart will still its relentless rhythm. And in this knowing, we find the reason to live this life in the most beautiful way.

There’s a strange, sweet truth in acknowledging mortality. It stops the frantic scramble for “someday.” There is no golden age waiting; there’s only the quick, beautiful brutality of now.

It’s why I let the coffee scald my tongue a little, why I lean into the awkward silence in the mall lift, why I pivot the moment he grabs me from behind. Because what awaits when we shift is where the beauty lies...in the eternity resting in his gaze, the gift in the catch of his breath, his fight for survival, for her, when death unexpectedly calls.

Happiness isn’t coming.

It is.

The present moment is eternally being created.

Sometimes I look at my hands, and they look like my mother’s... hands that have done too much but can still hold room for the infinite. Like when they cup the face of a friend mid-sentence, turn a page in a well-loved book, or reach out into warm rain.

That’s the bitter part: knowing this feeling, this being, is a lease that will expire without notice.

Yet the sweetness is undeniable. It makes the simple act of smelling flowers, slurping coffee, or locking eyes with him (eyes that hold both love and lust) feel like the melody of life itself.

A beautiful life means something different for everyone. For some, it’s peace and quiet, the gentle rhythm of ordinary days. For others, it’s chaos and creation, the thrill of motion, the striving for perfection. Some find meaning in their suffering, crafting identity from pain; others find that pain itself is their pleasure, proof that they’re still alive.

But balance is the sweet spot... the still point between opposites, where joy and sorrow meet and neither overwhelms the other. We need both to understand the value of either: light and dark, love and loss, solitude and belonging, doing and resting. The good and the bad define each other, and in knowing both, we live the whole.

Some people spend their whole lives building (a family, a dream, a legacy) and it’s in the slow, deliberate doing that they exist. Others move instinctively, never pausing to question, living through motion and momentum.

Both are, and neither is.

Maybe that’s what it all comes down to: to live fully is to embrace contradiction. To understand that beauty isn’t always gentle, that peace can rise from discord, that breath is both a beginning and an ending. 

Right now is enough.

Right now is everything.

So, feel the sun on your skin. Welcome the shade when it arrives. Value both silence and noise. Acknowledge the stranger passing on the street. Revel in desire, and in the quiet after passion fades.

We are brief, messy, astonishingly complex arrangements of stardust and rhythm... a hot flash of existence making our way to infinity. Every connection, every touch, every breath is a whisper of gratitude for creation.

It’s heartbreaking, this brevity. It truly is. But in that brevity, the value lives.

For now, I sit in silence on the school bench beside a quiet soul sister, watching our girls at play, their laughter ringing out, making this moment eternal and precious.

And that is everything.

Alhamdullilah.