Recently, I caught up with a friend I hadn’t seen in forever. In the same breath, you could say that this is a friend who I’ve known for an identical amount of time: forever. While he told me about all the things that had happened since the last time we’d properly seen each other (in that case, forever is more accurately something like seven years), he mentioned that he often thinks about a grand statement I’d made to him back then. Whenever this happens—when somebody winds up to quote ‘former me’ back to ‘current me’—I always tense up a little bit. The chances that I won’t agree with what I said then, or even more likely, won’t remember saying it all, despite apparently having said it with conviction, are pretty high. That can be a little awkward.
In this case, what I’d apparently said to him was that although people are always talking about how short life is, I felt the opposite: I believed that life was in fact very long. He said he’d referred to it at times when he regretted making a change “late” in life—there was something comforting about the idea that even though he may have already wasted a lot of time being one way, there was also still plenty of time left to be the other way. For the record, I don’t remember saying that, and while I also don’t find it particularly novel, I was happy to discover that I still agree with myself for once.
This month—all 29 days of it—we’re going to dig into the idea of forever from as many different angles as time allows. What makes “forever” feel like a romantic concept? What imbues it with a sense of doom and gloom?
On the agenda…
-Practical tips for making your clothes last forever
-Relationship advice from a couple who’ve been together forever
-A survey of people shopping for New York’s sparkliest diamonds (which are, as they say, forever)
-And a good old fashioned Haley Nahman thinkpiece on what that seven-letter word really means
And what else? What do you want to know more about? Give us a list of things in your life that you want to last longer and then give us another list of too-short things that you wish you could stretch out into infinity. We’ll take it from there!
Photos by Alexis Jesup of Colors Collective. Prop Styling by Rose Kennedy. Featuring Brent Neale ring.
