Who you were before I met you

 One of Cro's practical defences against the existential dread of death, even well before that potential dread loomed over the horizon, was to say to herself "Why should I be worried about all the millions of years when I'm dead, if I'm not equally worried about all the millions of years before I was alive?"

I don't think she particularly made up that idea, but it was a practical comfort when the 'big D' pops up in your thoughts or your life. It balances out the two great absences of information.

In a similar way, with anyone I have joyously loved in the past or the person I so joyously love now, I have a great fondness for who they were before we met. I hope they felt or feel the same towards me. The knowledge that your loved one was out there in the world being themselves and growing up and loving and enjoying has always made me feel good. When you see childhood photos that contain a smaller but very recognizable version of the person you love, it is both sweet but also a reminder that they had their own course and path in the world, just as I did. And that we might not have met, had doors slid the other way, but we did and we are so lucky to have intermingled our particles, souls, histories. But yet I am curious about that metaverse, all those other futures that could have, would have occurred if we hadn't met. I do hope you would have been happy in that alternative future, I do hope I would have been happy. Because it is implicit in the passage of time that 'things might not have turned out this way'. You can be very very happy that they did or that they have, but you cannot ignore the logical possibility that they might not. 

"If I had not gone to that party; If I had not replied to that message; If you (or I) had decided it wasn't the right time to take this jump" It is what we semantic engineers call the 'counterfactual conditional'. It didn't happen, but what if? "If I'd known you were coming, I'd have greased the step", as my mother used to sing, parodically. 

You sometimes find out that at some time in the past you happened to be in the same place at the same time, and wonder how the you of that time would have found the contemporaneous person-who-would-eventually-become-their-love. You might have each been different enough that you would not have clicked at that time, even though you clicked so well later. Timing is everything!

There is of course a mirror-image to 'who you were before I met you' and that is 'who you will be after I am gone' or 'who I will be after you are gone'. And 'gone' can occur for all sorts of reasons, but eventually it will happen for one definite and inescapable reason, as it has for me and Cro. And then that whole picture of 'who you were before we met' has another element added to it: 'who I am now that you are gone'

Think of it like a highway: You pull onto the road and see a car in the next lane. You smile at the driver. She smiles back. You travel in happy continuation (admittedly with rather poor lane discipline) until one of you pulls off that highway. There is a period where you are travelling this road of life together, but there was a time before it, and there will be a time after it. Of course this metaphor ignores all the joy and closeness and love in a life shared, but it is implicit in every relationship. It starts, continues, and then it ends, even if that end is the end of one of the lives in the relationship. It always ends. But I cannot bring myself to feel at all unhappy about this very nature of life and relationships and mortality. It's our condition, so lean into it, enjoy each day with the knowledge of what we are. And, if I may, I would quote 'Eternity' by William Blake one more time:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise