Inertia

"Only the good die young," croons Billy Joel, and we all know exactly what he's talking about. It is always those who are too light, too bright for this planet that seem to make their exits early. We concede that it could be in part because they are immortalized in the bloom of their youth, too soon to make the mistakes the rest of us make sooner or later and live to regret, but we wonder, somehow, if it isn't something more than that. What if…they are special? Spirits, angels even, who have agreed somewhere out in the ether, before they took bodies in this life, to come to earth for only short periods at a time, bless those they come in contact with intensely, and then leave again, lift off into the next cycle of life and love? And what if…you had the unlikely experience of knowing such a spirit twice in one lifetime? Once as their peer and once as their elder? How we long for such a reprieve from the losses we experience, how we hope to be brushed, even for an instant, with the ethereal traces of the one who is gone from us. What if it happened for real, and you knew it?