Thursday, November 11, 2010

It's a Secret

It’s a secret, you see…
How long we’re gonna have
With the ones who are here with us.
It’s a secret.
Nobody’s gonna tell
Because nobody can tell
How long we’re gonna have
With the ones who are here with us.
It’s a secret.
But we’re human,
And stupid,
And vain…
That’s no secret.
We let our tempers flare
And choose to act as though
We’ve all the time in the world
With the ones who are here with us.
For we are human,
And stupid,
And vain.
It’s no secret:
We imagine we’ll have time
To mend that broken fence—
To let some water pass under the bridge—
To let things cool down
Before admitting we were wrong.
Yet we know about the secret.
Beyond that,
We are so vain,
So stupid,
So human,
We let a parting pass
Without telling those we love
How much we love them.
We hesitate to appreciate.
We second-guess our instinct to share.
We let moments pass.
We leave things unspoken.
We keep it to ourselves,
Waiting for that perfect time.
We tell ourselves the lie
About how there’ll be some other time,
As if we’ve got some guarantee
Set in stone and bound by law.
Stupid, vain humans,
Resenting,
Ignoring,
Taking for granted.
Stupid, vain humans,
Crying for opportunities lost,
Crying for just one more day,
Just one more hour,
One more minute,
Moment.
Crying.
The secret is:
There’s no tomorrow until it is today.
There’s no later until it is now.
There’s no sometime until it is this time.
And when today is too late,
Now is no longer able,
And this time is this loss:
We remember the secret:
It’s a secret,
How long we’re gonna have
With the ones who are here with us.
Shhhh.

2 comments:

Purple Cow said...

Is this some song or did you make it up? hmmmm... We're too busy worrying about how to hide our own stupid secrets that we forget that the ultimate secret is the one of our own existence. I, too, wrote about secrets a few blog posts ago...in a different way. Your take is more complete.

I wish I knew what made you write this?

EyeRytStuf said...

I made it up. I did that thing where I don't do much of an edit and I put it out there as-is, despite my knowing a few days away and some editing later is usually a good thing.

What made me write it is this young man who was the son of someone I knew in high school passed away suddenly not long before I wrote this. It just reminded me of how we tend to think we have forever with those we love, and we don't. But we keep acting like we do.

So it made me think about how stupid I was for 25 years with the whole Brad thing, and that's the first bit where I'm all about "time to mend the fence," and so on. Then I started to think about the things I sometimes want to say to people now, but don't--because I'm afraid they'll think I'm sappy, or take it the wrong way, or will react in such a way as to make me wish I'd not said anything at all.

Because, again, if I remember that important fact (we don't know how long we have with these people we love) which humans so often seem to treat as if it were a huge secret nobody can know about, I wouldn't care about all that, and would instead say, "I love you" to those people we love, and take risks with our heart and give of ourselves and so on and so forth.

But I still behave as if it's a secret--so secret I'm keeping it from myself, even!