Forever.

It's just seven letters, three syllables, one small word.

Then again, love's an even smaller word.

Even 'I'll love you forever" is a paltry sentence that completely fails to express even one percent of the feeling that I need to explain to you.

I look up into the night sky, staggered by the knowledge that the light I see from the stars above has traveled across eternity. The smallest stars that wink and shimmer on this endless night may have ceased to exist countless millennia ago.

The universe is alive around us, a vast unfathomable cosmos within which the birth and death of a single soul is less than the blink of an eye. No one man, no group of men, no civilization, no race, can stand against the relentless tide of time. 

All things come into being, exist for a short time, then pass even from memory like no more than the wraith-like clouds that waft through the night sky, seen briefly in the moon shadow then dispersing unmourned.

All things. 

All people.

Except you.

You alone are eternal. 

Simply by existing you gave purpose to my own life. From the first day that I finally discarded the blinkered veil of fear and saw you clearly, your eyes alone became the place where my sun rose and set. 

Love like ours is forever.

So, perhaps ALL real love is forever. 

Is it possible that every true lover feels as I feel? In the act of reaching out, breaching the barriers of fear, discarding the petty armaments that we clothe ourselves within to avoid the pain of loss or betrayal, perhaps every soul connects with the eternal and becomes part of forever.

And if that's true, perhaps forever is not a place in time after all, but a living, breathing entity that absorbs the energy of that love, the power of those emotions, the strength of the individual spirits that combine and make the whole.

In forever, there is no death because there is no end. Forever is a circle of energy, a wheel that spins the invisible threads of its own existence and weaves a tapestry so immense that our minds cannot comprehend its complexity. Each life is perhaps no more than a single stitch in that vast picture; yet in the way that it weaves into the cloth, each life is immeasurably important and every soul is a precious link in the endless chain of eternity.

I thought I lost you today.

In the confusion, the chaos, the fear, I believed you gone from my life and my heart was eclipsed by the shadow of that loss. In that momentary pain, I wanted to die too. I lost my faith in life,  my belief in forever.

I saw my own mortality, and I was afraid. I faced the thought of life without you and was lost, bewildered, undone. I saw the scythe of death sweep so closely to our lives that I floundered in the wake of its cold caress.

Yet now, as I lie in your arms, as I feel your strength, your reality and know that I am not alone, my mind dances to a strange, discordant rhythm.  Because, in needing to reaffirm the reality of your physical existence, I feel as though I betrayed the true meaning of our love.

One day, the scythe will not whisper past. One day, pray that it be far in the future, one of us will not come home. That is not morbidity, simply fact. Perhaps age will take you before me. Disease or accident or violence may take either of us with the random roll of fate's dice. I finally faced that today. Death became a little over-familiar. He made a house-call and introduced himself. He left a calling card that I cannot erase, no matter how hard I scrub at the stain of his visit.

But I learned something else today.

It doesn't matter.

I love you forever.

It's not just a meaningless phrase. It's not a denial of mortality. It is as irrefutable a fact as the touch of your skin against mine.

We are connected. We are skeins of thread that will lie together eternally in the endless tapestry of life. As we have touched each other, so we have touched the lives of every other soul  we have met in this adventure we call existence. In the memory of others, our actions during the days of our lives have sent ripples through the tapestry; changing our own tiny portion of forever so that we are indelible, eternal.

I cannot lose you. That's what I realized today.

Even if the body that houses your soul is extinguished, you remain. You will always remain, just as a total eclipse of the sun merely hides the light from our eyes, rather than erasing it.

Behind the shadow of death, there is a deeper truth.

Love endures.

Forever.