what makes a beautiful life.

I hope when death arrives, I’ll know that out of all trillion lives I could have lived, this was the most beautiful. I want to bathe in that realisation, let it consume me. Consume me in the way a lover’s laughter does, when their eyes fold and wrinkle. Wash over me like the many rivers and lakes I waded in. May I have made a home out of the risks I took and the chances I held hands with. And know that I danced. Danced in open fields, on tabletops and beneath gums.

There are many moments I’d happily wring from the folds of my memories, the ordinary evenings and daily mundanities. Most of life will never become a story I’ll tell. But it’ll be one that I felt. You see time could not pass me by if I sit with it. If I fold my laundry while dusk yawns, and a lavender candle smokes beside a spinning vinyl. If the only sunrises I miss are ones I trade for glorious late nights. And even when cigarettes stain my fingers, the 3am conversations will never scrub off.

Sometimes the burden of existing settles in me. It seeps into my skin and I swear I will never feel free again. It is in these moments where I’ve come to appreciate the world. For I could skip or stumble my way up a mountain yet the view remains indifferent; it is miraculous, nonetheless. The issue is I mistake only memorable moments as meaningful ones. As though the best days are those I photographed. But I found they are the days I forgot to take any at all, my hands too busy holding another’s, my eyes bare to a landscape.

And yes a beautiful life is costly, we pay for it when we yearn and mourn and miss and hurt. The beauty in it isn’t in the extraordinary moments, but in ordinary moments that are never treated as just that. It asks for a belief that each second is just as precious as any other.

I have spent so much time trying to understand myself, and not nearly enough time allowing myself to exist. Perhaps we aren’t supposed to know anything at all, really. I never was decisive in the moment; always unsure if someone was the one, or if a job was my passion, or a town was my place. I was so fixated on finishing the puzzle I’d forgotten the joy of finding even a single piece that fit.

Presence is all that life has ever asked for. To kiss with unbound passion. To seek with an open heart. Walk alongside the doubt and sorrow and let life happen. We speak so often of finding ourselves, as though we are hiding somewhere beyond fulfilment, but I wonder if we are the essence of every moment we stayed present for.

Every time I have ever longed to be living in eventually became another ordinary Tuesday. Meaning was never waiting for me to find it. It had followed me, as I made tea for someone I loved, as I laughed until my ribs burned, as I watched the sun kiss a mountain peak or sat amongst the night basking in the moon.

When death comes, I hope it finds me interrupting its plans because a flower caught my eye. I hope it asks if there were muddy boots by my door and books with folded corners and biscuit crumbs on the table. I hope I leave behind kind words, a passing smile and handwritten recipes.

There is only grievance when life ends, if we spent so much of it elsewhere. If I am granted one final thought, I don’t wish it to be of all the things I could have been, but everything I was fortunate enough to be a part of. If I know that I was here, that I loved, and lingered, and paid attention, then out of every life I never lived, this one will have been enough.

—may you cherish every dawn as if it is the last, amber.