The winds have lain still upon the ground and all is silent but the yips of young coyotes in the distance. Above, thin clouds shroud a desert moon just past full. Distant mesas are limned in a silver glow. It is a rare conjunction of events that makes West Texas beautiful. But this beauty is a juxtaposition of experience; it is relative to the everyday life here.
On a night like this, I would want to sit outside with Dustin and drink beer, having long conversations about life and ideas and the choices we make. Those conversations will still happen, but they will be one-sided. They will be me searching for meaning without him and ending with “I miss you.” And they will take place in the beauty of the world.
But the beautiful is tinged with sorrow for all things change and nothing is forever. Many who have lost see in the world a diminution of beauty; a world become grey. I felt much the same after losing my mother four years ago. It is different now. Because Dustin was young, I assumed I would have years to continue to develop the depths of an already deep relationship. But taking for granted those we love breeds the guilt at their loss and bleeds the color from the world. Now that I can no longer take for granted that Dustin will be there, the world strikes with a vibrancy I have previously not known. I see the world so differently now. I see the world as I would want to share it with him, to experience it in tandem. I perceive the world I experience always with the edge of Dustin in my mind. This beauty of the world is not an objective thing experienced, beauty is the experience of memory and longing against the unyielding reality of his absence from my life.
Keats was wrong. Truth is not beauty, nor beauty truth. The truth of beauty lies in the sorrow of its eminent passing.