There can be something beautiful about things that go away. Ironically, transient things themselves are becoming rarer. We are obsessed with recording everything; I’m in favor of this, to some extent. I think it is important that we remember our history, that we record our failures so we move forward, together, as humanity. Mistakes aren’t all failures–repetitions are.

Do not mistake my fascination with the temporary as an indictment of remembrance–I myself am one who endeavors to record things. I am a writer–in some sense; I write to capture emotions, ideas, and/or moments, caging them on my page. I am a photographer–could there be any clearer example of an admirer of crystallizing the present? Yet I still find myself drawn to lost things.

Flowers are pretty partially because they do not last–their beauty derived from transience. The pedestrian quickly becomes plain; habitual beauty fades to obscurity, relegated to expectations. Beauty can be, for some things, motivated almost wholly by their novelty. You see it with soft ocean sunsets; with orange butterflies’ flurried flights; with late night conversations with a close friend. There are moments where you can look and see the obvious transience of time–the truth of temporality–our truth. That is the world we live in, despite our best efforts to stretch every moment to infinity; despite our technology which lets us cage moments for eternity.

But it is not the whole moment. The flash of a photo, the ink of your pen, the words of a story–they lose something, still. They can get oh-so-tantalizingly-close, but they lose something. The experience, some inextricable part of the joy of a moment, is not contained–cannot be caught nor bought. Something is born free, borne only in the present. Time is lost when you save a moment, time felt in full when you savor it for a moment.

This feeling doesn’t extent to everything. There is no beauty in death, even death for “higher causes” or however you may cope. Sometimes change is just loss–I seek not the latter whatsoever. I derive the pleasure in the moment, in the idea that the parts of the moment–actors in a scene–will never be recreated, never in the same way. The play is for me to enjoy, and in that moment I consume it–I truly consume it–in a manner which is so rare in the digital era. There is no consumption, there is no ownership, there is no reflection–there is only renting. I enjoy consuming and being consumed by the moment; our ouroboros: beget and depleted in a perfect, irreproducible frame. Context, the missing link, contributes heavily to certain kinds of enjoyment. Your surroundings build something beyond, some gestalt–inexorable time converts a frame to an experience.

Perhaps this is due to my lack of memory; I receive kinship in gossamer moments, for then I am no longer the only one bound to lose something. Perhaps I seek this beauty, but others characterize it as destruction. Perhaps I alone will enjoy the ephemeral moments, and when I die there will be none to sip on their sweet satisfaction.

A fitting (beautiful) end.