still, I suppose

I came across the name of a former acquaintance today and it occurred to me with some surprise that in all these years I had forgotten about him, he had continued to exist.  He's continued to live out the same hours and days as I have, in some removed unknowable place in the world.  He has had heart swells and truly terrible days and humdrum commutes and mornings without alarms and delicious meals and hurried meals and heartache and loss and sour stomachs and good laughs.  He's aged.  He's forgotten people of his own.  This is a mere acquaintance, I'm talking, whose regular presence and then absence from my life was hardly registered.   And yet he remains out there, continuing.

"That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."

ok.

But to what end?  Who even notices or cares?  Who is this play for and how is my small and ordinary life in any way a contribution toward something?  Though I do suspect that there's something honest just below the surface of this daily surviving, existence as a whole seems remarkably unimportant.  An unimportant miracle, you might say, given that our emotional spikes and delusions of grandeur demand some pizzazz.

But truly, we are here until we are not.  Even though our little lives do in fact impact everything, the grand total matters very little- not in the end and not even now, really.

Still, I suppose I am glad I am here.