Quote-Worthy Moments

There are certain moments in life when you can see yourself standing on an edge. It's a threshold, it's a defining moment that will change something forever. Either it's an event that will change your life, or one that you've been anticipating for years, or maybe just something you couldn't get the thought of out of mind.

But it's always those moments that we theorize about, that we imagine, that we play over and over again in our minds and try to play out. And in these hypothetical situations we run through, we always come across the question of what we want to say. When we have hours, days, sometimes even weeks, months, or years to think of what would sound best in a given situation, of course it comes out spectacularly and notably.

When we really hit that point in time, though...it's never that dramatic. It's never that perfect moment we imagined or desired. It's human, it's flawed. Those perfect words don't flow to our lips, no quote-worthy phrases emerge to grace the instance. More often than not, it feels like there's something left to say. And maybe there is, but sometimes there's just nothing that we can say to any of it, sometimes we just have to let it go.

These moments strike more often than we'd like...when we first meet someone, when we say goodbye, when we start something, when we finish it. These moments happen to all of us, we find ourselves engulfed in them and feel that we should commemorate them, but have no way to do it, can't put words to the thoughts, the emotions, and sometimes even the things we think we should feel but don't.

It seems that we want to attach significance to certain things, but in thinking over them so much, something gets lost in the thought process. And when we try to sum it up, try to put a phrase over it to make it mean something, to consolidate it into a kernel of pure meaning, we find that any words we can conjure fall short.

Quote-worthy moments don't exist in real life, no matter how hard we try to bring them about, altogether too often they fail at what we are attempting. Maybe that's for the best, though. Perhaps it is better that we can't consolidate every moment into a single statement that expresses it. There's some fragility in everything that happens that way, it adds a given significance to what we experience in life itself that can't be recreated or relived.

Life wouldn't be what it is if it were so simple to quote each moment like that. And the reality of that is bittersweet. But as I've said before, I like the bittersweet. I think it's definitely worth appreciating.