Lovers and Other Strangers

In the end though, does it matter who you love?  Or who you talk to?  Or whose arms wake up in each morning so long as there is someone there, someone to hold you and listen to you?  Does it really matter if tomorrow morning, I wake up and kiss someone I've never met instead of someone I've lived for, someone I've loved?

Of course it does.  Because there's something in that familiarity, in the shared experience, in the ups and downs of the past that brought you where you are today.  There will always be those moments, those memories, those bits and pieces of the past that carry into the present and the future.  The arms aren't just arms and the lips aren't just lips.  Those are the arms that held you when you cried because you didn't know where to go in your life.  Those are the lips that pressed against your cheeks when you needed the pain to go away.

Strangers give you views into lives that aren't yours and worlds to which you do not belong.  They give you one day, or one night, or one hour in an entirely different situation, with an entirely different set of priorities and rules.  With a stranger, nothing matters, everything goes.  But with a lover, everything matters yet everything still goes.  There are no secrets, there are no spaces for shame.  Every touch means something with a lover, where with a stranger it may only be there to fill a gaping void.

Some days we need lovers to hold us together, and other days we need strangers to help us fall apart.  Perhaps we need neither, but each brings elements of their own into our lives.  With each acquaintance, new or old, we discover something more about people and something more about ourselves.  There come days in our lives when lovers become strangers and strangers turn into lovers.  Everything comes and goes, everyone serving their own role in this everchanging world, this eternity full of people.  Filled to the brim as it is, with lovers and other strangers.