I think that melancholy is a form of heartbreak.

I never thought about it much before my fifties, but in my later years I am definitely haunted. People I knew, places I’ve been, experiences I’ve had, who I once was – all lost with no possibility of recovery. Those people and places don’t exist anymore, not even me. Especially not me.

There was a time when anything seemed possible. I was a young adult, late 20s early 30s I think, and I had just gelled a circle of friends for the first time in my adult life. I don’t remember all the names, but I remember some: another Ben, Jessica, Erik, Marty, Lauren, I think perhaps a Nate, and more.

We gathered to game – not video games nor board games, but story gaming. Stories about alternate realities, spaceships, or modern day vampires and mages. Most of the time I was the designated MC, the gamemaster as it were, inventing the story world, and everyone played their characters in the worlds I invented.

It wasn’t always gaming, though that seemed the core connection. Sometimes we would play other games. I remember one collectible card game from back then, a game called Illuminati New World Order, a game of conspiracies and control, in which the tabloid stories of the supermarket were well-represented. That was fun. I guess that must have been around 1994, making me 26.

Now I am 56, more than twice as old. Some friends drifted away, other friendships ended more explosively, a few were strained from the start. They changed, I changed, the world changed.

There’s a song I came across by REM called Nightswimming:

Nightswimming…
deserves a quiet night
I’m not sure all these people understand

It’s not like years ago
The fear of getting caught
Of recklessness and water

They cannot see me naked
These things, they go away
Replaced by everyday

Me and my friends from those days also engaged in nightswimming. We would wait until dark, then go to a local pond they knew of, some would strip naked and jump in. I was always too afraid, to embarrassed to be naked, so I waited on the shore with others that perhaps felt the same, discussing new stories, our lives, and the future.

Now when I listen to this song my heart breaks and I weep profusely, every time. I did not know it would be so fleeting, that everything would be so fleeting. Even me. At the time, it seemed like the days went on forever, but they did not.

It took me decades to appreciate the present the way I do now, although I still can’t hold on to it, of course – no one can. And even in 1994, I now know that while I was cocooned in my ignorance, other people in their fifties and sixties were discovering what I was oblivious to then. And I look at the young people now who can’t feel time and life slipping through their fingers yet and know they too will understand some day.

Time will always have the last laugh. All the other bad things are a symptom of time. Time is the unstoppable thief, and life we learn is the experience of perpetual loss.

This is why I cry.

I mourn the friends I had, both those who I know no longer, and those I still know, for they are not who they were. I mourn myself, long gone as well.

Maybe the only wisdom is this: what you have lost you can never truly get back, and what you have not lost, you will, and sooner than you think. Live now. Risk now. Speak now. Love now. Why not?

Me, I grieve a young man named Ben Grant, waiting at the water’s edge for courage.

Light him a candle, if you will.