It is amazing what the mind can recall—the information that hides in the folds and buzzes around for so long that you believe you have forgotten it, until it works its way free at obscure times. Like knowing the lyrics to a kid's song that you've always hated, even as a kid, yet you can sing it word for word. Or knowing that words like kayak and radar are palindromes and are the same both forwards and backwards. Who knows things like this? Who needs to?
Random knowledge can come in handy on occasion. To appear smarter than you know you are, you can spurt off these facts. Some may look at you in awe, asking how do you know such things? And you may simply smile and say, I am in the know. Others may look at you with sidelong glances, wondering why someone would want to know such things, do you not have enough to do in your life that you need to fill it with little known facts? Then there are those opportune times, particularly while playing trivia games when you can say with ease that you know that the word 'Tuktoyaktuk' is an Inuit word for 'resembles a caribou'. Or that you know, for a fact, that a wolf's temperature runs at 108.9 degrees. You may win your team the game and you will be toasted with a round of Cokes. Or these thoughts may just ring around in your head and invade the quiet moments when you are trying to think of anything else other than what a wolf's temperature might be.
Here, in this quiet moment, there is no one around to impress with my knowledge. It barely impresses me. Thoughts of Pi wander into my mind. There is no reasoning behind this--just a residual math class lesson easing it's way out of my subconscious and into the forefront. I think of Pi, it's meaning. There is no end to the numbers past 3.14. It goes on forever. What does that mean word mean, forever? Eternally, evermore, ceaselessly, perpetually, without end? How can I fathom such a number, such a concept?
Forever is the promise that millions make each year in front of witnesses. They make the promise, yet how few will make it to their own tangible forevers, hand in hand? My own parents made such a pledge, letting it unravel too soon after the words were spoken and now I am sitting on a large piece of driftwood on a Treatied beach pondering forever because, in a few short hours, I am about to make the same vow. Yet I have only now realized that this forever will be literal. How could I have grasped it before, with only 18 years having passed around me?
I continue to turn the word around in my mind. Staring out into the ocean, surveying the landscape, I recognize that this spot, here, is forever. The ocean may reclaim this one spot, or it may recede, becoming choked with trees. Rocks may crumble from nearby cliffs and crash into the same spot I chose to throw myself into. Yet this place is forever. It will continue to change, revolve, evolve. This forever is simple, beautiful, natural.
The translucent skin of an ancient, far off vampire permeates my thoughts. A vivid image of forever, it is a haunting, brittle shale picture of what forever will soon mean to me. I, too, will look like this, giving up everything to become it over a fathomless timespan. In all of the time it will take me to watch my skin turn paper-thin, I could try to reach the end of Pi with all efforts ending in vein. But I will reach the end of the lives of everyone I once claimed to love. I'll become an invisible witness, forced to watch them fade away into a hereafter I will probably never know. I will watch them fade, then watch their tombstones crumble into nothing. It will always be like this as I become a voyeur, watching humans begin and end, begin and end, begin and end. I'll walk around them, amongst them and in the spaces in between, but never with them. But I will have pi. Pi will keep me going. Surely there must be an end to it, and I will have all of the time in the world to find it.
Another ending follows the waves into shore and crashes into my thoughts. It is the wrinkling of a beautiful, russet-skinned boy who is not aging now, but will some day. Life will carve niches into his skin, especially around his mouth where a smile that will always be mine lives. With each grey strand, his hair will display a lifetime of lessons learned. It could mirror my own change, if only I would let it. Forbidden thoughts churn in my mind--the image of my body entwined with his, and the thoughts of us both returning to the dust one day. Abruptly, the picture of forever comes in startlingly, brilliantly, beautifully clear. I know exactly how long forever is. It is the amount of time I am willing to wait here on this beach for a boy to come back home and throw his 108.9-degree arms around me.