The Spare

QUE SERA

Yesterday is history, so you've got to get through it

Tomorrow is a mystery, so let's just do it.

Even when the rain falls

You and I will stand tall.

No matter what you go through,

I'll never leave you.

-Que Sera, Justice Crew

Whatever will be, will be. Luke said, that no matter how you don't want the bad things to happen they will happen anyway. All you have to do is not to let them dictate what you do to your life. If you choose to relive the bad, you will live with the bad again and again. Be brave. Live tomorrow like yesterday never happened. The purpose of waking up the next day is because yesterday is past and today is what's important. You can't change the past, but you can learn from it. Carpé that diem. Live that happy moment today even if at the back of your mind there is always that drop of poison: the knowledge that something bad will happen in the future. If you close your eyes to the positive, you will drown in the negative. Find something to live another day for. Something that inspires you. Life has an expiration date. It is your task to make the most of it. Fail. Learn. Do it over again. It's an endless cycle, but what it means is that you're living.

I find myself standing outside an art studio with Luke. He takes my right hand in his left and raises it to his lip. My stomach jitters at the contact. Luke looks at my eyes, "Ready to head into the unknown?". Curiosity must have shown in my expression because he then assures me that everything will be okay. We step into the white marble floors and I became silent. Awed by the magnificence of everything that surround me. Art, in all manner of it fills the place, basking it in a wondrous kind of magic. Sculptures, paintings of many form, photographs. Every single one depicts life from its glorious beauty to its diabolical harshness.

One painting catches my attention in particular. I'm not an art expert but when you look at everything here, you can tell at one glance that it's not really as grand as the others. The brush strokes are sloppy. It was done haphazardly and it is by far below the level of finery other works here posses. But that's just it. No matter how poorly done it is, I find myself being pulled by the vacuum of emotion that went into making this piece.

An image of two hands trying to reach each other. Wanting to join but cannot. An impossibility wanting to be defied. I inch closer to the far wall on the right side of the building, closing the proximity of me and that painting. I read the plaque below it. I Love You Forever Even When I Can't. I stare harder and take in the pain and suffering it must have taken one person to make such a sad piece of art. I clench my teeth and pull the stop wire of the tears. "Its so sad." I say to no one in particular. Luke pulls me into a side embrace and we remain quiet to look at the art. "I see that it has caught another victim." We turn around to look at the one who said those words. It was a woman, probably in her forties. She was wearing a business attire and her strawberry blond hair was pinned into a high ponytail. She smiles at us. Her amber eyes catching the twinkle of the lights. Luke and I take her hand and introduce ourselves. She moves toward the painting and touches the space in between two hands. "Yes. The story is rather very sad." I look at Luke and he squeezes my hand in reassurance. "I'm afraid I knew the artist." She goes on. "He has long ago left this world. But he left us many wonderful works. Finer and by far more intricately beautiful than the first one he ever made. This particular one, I cannot see myself parting with, however." I take in a deep breath. "You mean. These." I motion for the whole place. "All these are yours? A collection?" She nods. "We have amassed quite a number. We share them with others who want to experience them as well. This one, isn't ours. It was our mothers."

"She did live quite the life. It was a life like anyone else's. Ordinary, if you may say. But she did get her heart torn when she was very young. Her first love was at fifteen years old and he died. This painting, was her last memory of him. He painted it. Or rather, he was supposed to have been the one who had painted it."

"She had believed most of her life that he did make it for her. But see, there was someone on the sidelines. Someone, both of them never new about until the right time came. He listened. He listened to their tragic love from the wall separating both rooms in that hospital. His first attempt at something in life after his own was taken from him is this piece of art. A picture of devastating and forsaken love. I love you forever. Even when I can't was a confession, of a heart that found the most beautiful love, even if it will live to be ugly in all manner."

"That kind of love between two people changed one broken person forever. That love put pieces of him back together. And that love, no matter how much impossible to recreate, happened again. It grew to be just as beautiful and ugly as the first. The only difference was, the second one found its fate."

She looks at me and Luke. Her beauty when she was young is apparent and age only made her even more so. Elizabeth Mason Gentry and her brother had a collection of life lived by different people and they wanted others to appreciate it like they had. That art, or rather, that confession was their first introduction into real love. And that art was the one that taught me I was wrong.

I had known love. My mothers love. I may never live to find something the same again, but I now understand that love can happen twice even many times in one lifetime. I think, I might even be living in one kind right now. I'm done with impossibilities. I'm forgetting my yesterdays and I will live to seize my tomorrows. Because whatever will be, will be.