sometimes you only notice the vastness of your landscape when you step too far back,  and you are suddenly struck by how some huge stories loom only as their end makes them finite.

a romance scanning decades in tiny moments and huge punctuations. marriages and child birth and graduations and birthdays and illnesses and recoveries. 

breakfasts shared together, 

books read in tandem

frustrations and annoyances and questions overlooked for the greater picture. 

all the innate and subtle little gestures that become habits of affection as you continue to build and sculpt your life: buying a favorite food at the grocery, saving the last bite, making a joke at the right moment, brushing a forearm

you think those moments will just continue when they become so much a part of you

how can they not? 

growing up with my parents around one of the only things clear to me was that they had a great romance. great, in the way only a real world romance built on love and trust can be. awesome in its incredibly domestic ways: picking each other up for work, taking the same sunset walk every day. not a world spanning, war torn, tanned and youthful romance, but the kind of bond built on the beautiful and sad, the comfortable and sometimes ugly. 

it was a strange thing to behold, so close. whereas some of the families around us clearly had parents that revolved and evolved around their children, mine were like satellites to each other. they may have had love for others in the family, but they were locked on each other.

I don't mean to make sound unrealistic, or schmaltzy. I don't even mean to claim I understood it. It wasn't mine. I have no right to bear witness.

But growing up I knew one thing: you could find your best friend and love your best friend and want to see your best friend every day. and that could be good, and that could be enough. 

Today my father died. And I will mourn that as any child would. But when I step back the part I just can't look past is the vastness of their story now finite. One of them continuing a thousands memories that make up almost the whole of their life and existence. It is blinding and sad and beautiful. It is less like a giant light extinguished as a shift in the landscape that puts so much in shadow. You can still see it in the back of your head. feel it there and guess its warmth, but that is only expressed in the wistfulness of the shadow it now casts.