fleeting, part 1.

I am writing this entry from my apartment -a small, leaning one bedroom on 18th street, which has become home to Jack and I.  Jack is next to me, acting confused and bewildered by the recent loss of a rubber ball, while I enjoy a can of beer (which I can't afford) and a cigar (which is why I can't afford the beer).  

I have been stood up, and it is raining the rain of a hurricane which reaches us all the way from the Atlantic coast or the gulf (I am not sure which), thinking about Jack.  What a funny thing to have a dog as your friend, but how much more odd to know that he is only on loan.  Perhaps it is the atmosphere of expensive smoke and cheap beer surrounded by books and the artifacts of an interesting life, but I see in Jack a new way of looking at people.  I wouldn't go so far as to put this in the category of philosophy -it is more the idle musing of a man spending a quiet evening immersed in solitude than a well-thought ideology- but I feel free to be honest with Jack, and why not?  He is, after all, my friend as much as anyone.  I invest in him my emotions: looking out for him, taking an interest in his likes (rubber balls, discarded bones from my kitchen, walks around the neighborhood), and simply spending time with him.   He travels with me, meets my friends, spends just as much time with me as I do with him.  But what of our future?

I know that Jack and I are friends, but he will leave eventually.  Thinking about this inevitability, I know that I will miss his company, but I also know that I am fortunate to have had this time.  And so it is with all of us: we are all eventually going to experience loss on some level.  It may be at the same level as Jack and his rubber ball (which has been lost during a game of fetch somewhere in the vicinity of my kitchen table and a mass of shoes), or it may be on a deeper and more permanent level, but it will happen.  What I am remembering -since I am no stranger to loss, or the sadness resulting from- is that the foreknowledge is part of what gives it value.  To use someone else's perspective: the pain then is part of the pleasure now.  If it lasted forever, I think it would become cheap.  That it ends, is the source of it's value.  Such is life, no?