Tiristeer-uhs

n. The bittersweet awareness that all things must end. Even at the start of things, you can feel the sense of an ending—settling into vacation while mentally preboarding your flight home, wondering how a new relationship will end before it's truly begun.

As a child, you saw the world as static. Then things started disappearing—your best friend moved away, the video store closed, the family dog died. That sense of loss drew you closer to those still alive, gave you reason to pay attention, hoarding details like a honeybee rushing flower to flower.

Why bother making long-term plans? Why fall in love when the best-case scenario is losing them? Yet there's kinship in impermanence—the stars and tombstones, the dog and honeybees, all united in our finiteness. The meaning of things isn't an emergent property of how long they last. We are the ones who define them.

To the honeybees, summer never ends. Their honey never expires. Maybe that buzzing is just another way of saying: We are here.