08/11/2026
Relationships
All relationships are not created equal.
And maybe they were never supposed to be.
I’m intentionally leaving the word “relationship” wide open here.
I’m not specifying human relationships. Or romantic relationships. Or even relationships between living things.
Because the more I think about it, the more I realize how many relationships we have over the course of a life.
People.
Animals.
Plants.
Places.
A car.
A boat.
A motorcycle.
A favorite tool worn smooth by your hand.
Something doesn’t necessarily have to be alive for us to develop a relationship with it. We become familiar with things. We learn their sounds, their peculiarities, their limitations. We care for them. Depend on them. Sometimes talk to them.
And eventually, sometimes, we say goodbye to them..Some relationships last a lifetime. Some last twenty years.
Some last a year and a half, burn incredibly bright, become intensely important, and then crash and burn. Sometimes because something went wrong. Sometimes because ending it is the only way to preserve whatever good remains.
Some friendships exist across distance and time. You see each other twice a year, maybe less. Sometimes by design. Sometimes completely by chance. That doesn’t make the friendship smaller.
It doesn’t make it less real.
Then there are relationships that last only minutes.
Or seconds.
You pass a stranger somewhere. Your eyes meet. They smile. You smile back.
That’s it. You never see each other again.
But for one second, two lives crossed.
There was an exchange.
There was a relationship.
Maybe it’s the fly that lands beside you while you’re sitting outside.
Maybe it’s an animal that shares your home for fifteen years.
Maybe it’s a plant you put into the ground as something small and watched become enormous.
Maybe it’s the old car that carried you through a particular chapter of your life.
Or the tool you’ve reached for thousands of times without ever thinking about the fact that your hand knows exactly where to find it.
Relationships exist on different scales of time.
Some end because people change. Some because circumstances change.
Some because things wear out.
Some because staying would do more damage than leaving.
And some of the most beautiful relationships end for the simplest and hardest reason of all.
One of the lives involved reaches its end.
Maybe we’ve put too much emphasis on longevity as proof that a relationship was successful. Maybe permanence was never the measure.
A relationship doesn’t have to last forever to have mattered.
It only has to have happened.
Some stay for a lifetime.
Some stay for a season.
Some stay for a second.
What matters is what passed between you while you were both there.
))))) this observational transmission was inspired by a piece that I wrote entitled: the persistent fly. It is one of my observational transmissions, as I like to call them, on suno. You can find the link in the first comment (((( additionally, the photo that I am sharing with this particular transmission, is not my own work. It's a picture of a mobile that I saw at Junction361 (((((
