Sometimes, when I’m walking home and the light hits just right, I think about how everything we touch eventually fades. Flowers wilt even when we water them. Songs end even if we hum them over and over. People leave, or we leave them. And yet, there’s this stubbornness in us that keeps loving anyway. Maybe that’s the real miracle, not the kind you read in holy books, but the human kind, the persistence to care even when the world insists on ending. I’ve seen it in small ways. A friend still baking her grandmother’s bread recipe even though she never quite gets it right. We have a neighbor who's an old man. Every morning, he would sit on his porch, sipping coffee from a chipped mug, talking softly to no one. At first, I thought he was just muttering to himself. Then one morning, I heard him say, “Your orchids are blooming again.” His wife had passed five years before. He still tended to her plants every day. Love, I realized, doesn’t stop asking to be fed just because the other pe...
Hands by He Lihuai It happened in the middle of something painfully ordinary—folding laundry. I was standing there, pairing socks, half-distracted like usual, when I suddenly just stopped. My eyes landed on my hands, hands I’ve seen a million times before and out of nowhere, this thought bloomed: these hands won’t always be mine. It shook me a little. Not in a dramatic, existential crisis kind of way. More like a wave lapping at the edges of my awareness. It was the kind of truth that doesn't shout. It hums. And it stayed with me. The older I get, the more moments like that seem to happen. Little flashes that remind me that our bodies aren’t really ours forever. We act like they are, like we can shape them, preserve them, make them last. But they’re not permanent. They're on loan. We’re visitors in our own skin, passing through. I’m reminded of this beautiful passage in Toni Morrison’s Beloved , when Baby Suggs, holy, stands before her community, not to preach doctrine, but t...