A Special Retrospective
“I was thinking recently…”
“Careful, that’s dangerous.”
“It certainly can be.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“What makes time with people special.”
“Did you figure it out?”
“No… at least, not totally. I think maybe you’re not meant to know.”
“Why’s that?”
“Sometimes when you break things like that down, it… it stops making it special.
It’s like people think diamonds are amazing, but when you look more into it, they’re just compressed carbon.
They’re just pieces of coal squashed really hard for a long time.”
“And those special times are just people squashed together for a long time?”
“Maybe! But, things can lose their lustre if you try to dissect them. Try to figure them out too much.”
“So, part of what makes something special, is not knowing why it is special?”
“Exactly…or rather, vaguely…”
“What made you think this way?”
“…I remembered what their laugh sounded like last night.”
“Oh…”
“At least, I think I did. I remembered how their eyes would close, and their nose would crinkle.”
“What do you mean you think?”
“Well, I realised I hadn’t heard it in so long. Maybe it was their laugh, or maybe it wasn’t. I might have just been filling in the gap. I wasn’t sure.
And I realised I’ll probably never know if I’m right or not”
“Why so?”
“I’ll likely never hear it again.”
“But it was special, right?”
“What was?”
“The laugh. Or the fact you made them laugh. I think that’s pretty special in its own right. That has to make a lot of what happened worth it.”
“…I guess it did.”
“Then there’s the other part to your ‘Theory of Special’. You don’t have to think about what makes something special.
One part is it’s special because you don’t know why, and the other part is special because… it just is.”
“I thought it was anyway. But the special things usually don’t end. It sounds simple like that, but it was anything but.
“Simple or special?”
“To me the former, to others… maybe the latter.”
“Well, the special things only end when they stop being special to you. It’s still special to you, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Then that’s all that matters. And in the end, you’re ok.”
“It’s not about that though.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not about whether or not I’m ok.
It’s that I will be ok.”
A poem by Colm Horgan
