In The Last Year Lately

There's no way to combat the loss of innocence, but we can celebrate its passing. And necessarily, that passing comes as a surprise. There is no way , in the midst of a real youthful singularity, to know what's going on. You'll only know it by a hindsight that will initially disrupt you and make you rueful, wishing you'd realized you'd known while you were in the know. But it's like the photograph you're so desperate to take, to commemorate the moment, your mom always imploring everyone to smile or that uncle always trying to snap a shot of everyone at their most ignobly candid, reaching to reassure ourselves that this is it, this is the moment we've been waiting for! But its a canard. You'd never know you were in the throes of it until it's gone. And thats when the sadness can be crushing. Astoundingly crushing. You can never see it coming. And where it hits is some place deep, guttural, and uncontrollable. And you think, "oh I didn't know it would hurt this bad." You think, "what will someone think if they see me this way?" But you can't do anything about it. Something is lost you didn't know you had and now the hole is somehow deep and somehow deeply unsettling. But there's something else in there. Something ecstatic and untamable in its own right. The first glimmer that you had it, that it was yours, whatever it was. And sometime, perhaps much later, if you keep the pain fresh, and you ought to really keep the pain fresh, you can realize that you can be at it again, waiting in an ignorance you won't know is blissful for the next shoe to drop.