Dead Perspective

“How naive of me,” she said, “to think that I would feel no pain at the end of it all. I should know by now that caring leads to being hurt. I should have learned sooner that feelings have consequences too. But it’s okay,’’ she says, “looking at things from a different perspective, none of this matters much. Next month I will meet another boy who has learned to say what he thinks I want to hear, to tell me I’m pretty and smart and everything he’s looking for.”

“Next year I’ll have fallen in love maybe once, twice or a million times, with each stranger I might meet here and there. I’ll have laughed and cried myself to sleep over stupid things that aren’t worth remembering and sat up all night feeling numb when I should be on top of the world. I’ll have overthought about silly stuff and created problems that would not have existed otherwise.”

“‘But think about it’ my mother says. ‘Look at this from a different perspective, you are young. In the future, none of this will matter.’ But looking at things in a different point of view, I am smaller than a fragment of what has happened so far, and my tears mean nothing at all. I will swear my love is infinite but then in a universe where infinity is a minimum, how is perspective supposed to make me feel better?”