Middle school was the beginning of loss. Death came distantly at first, when one of the fourteen-year-old cool kids overdosed on heroin. I didn’t know the kid but had friends who did. A year later, death came formally, whispering suicide into the ear of my best friend. We were both twelve. If things became uncertain then, the years following were but lessons which taught that certainty is nothing more than illusion. Comfort born of a mind unable to withstand the ephemeral world.

Over the years, friends have ended their lives, overdosed, drunkenly driven to their end, been taken by cancer, and invented new ways of dying altogether. It’s hard to tell if it’s different anywhere else, and there’s no way to know whether it’s grace or chance that separates the taken from those left behind. Time eats us all, but those left behind are given stay to decide how violently we fight its gnashing jaws.

The thing is, we create time. Time is inherent to our understanding of the world, though it physically only shows itself by way of entropy. Heat transfers from things warm to things cold, until all of the heat is exhausted. So it is that our passing through the ephemeral world gives rise to our understanding of it. We learn because things pass, things change. Love is born, love grows, and love dies. We are left in its beautiful wake. Left to wonder at what has passed and what will come. In that wonder resides the present. The middle child. The child who, as much as we know, translates the past into future. It never passes until it is no more. It lives and moves and breathes, loving and suffering while it decides how to communicate the past to others. How to share the time it has had and the time it hopes to have. In this, the present—carried on by those left behind—decides what becomes future. As we pass, we choose what we show to those left behind with us, mixing the variety that colors the world of the present. This is the work of life, each day translating the love and suffering of the past into an uncertain future. Which can be both beautiful and tragic.