Wading Through Time

“The years teach what the days never know.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.”
--John Green, in his book LOOKING FOR ALASKA

Unprecedented

“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
--John Green, from THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
--poem by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott