The Book

Can you still remember the sweet gentle surface of the book we used to read? We swore we would never finish reading it. Each word as the most precious gift, each sentence as the most valuable jewel: we would read each piece of it like it was the last thing we would have ever read. And that's how we imagined it: you, me and our book, together, page by page, year by year, we would face eternity and live forever. Until one day we read the last page. It was yellow. And old. Most of all: we did not notice it - how could we ever suspect that we were actually getting to the end of it, that our eyes would soon rest in the words "the end" just to realize that nothing really lasts forever - not even the book we once started reading together. And so it was. You, me, and the last page of that old book that told us so many stories about the world and life and the universe. Stories of men and women, of lives and dreams and cultures. But in that moment, when our eyes met and our voices said it, "the end.", it was like those words were more powerful than anything else - like they could, by themselves, wipe out all that we had read.
The truth is those words didn't erase anything at all. All the moments, smiles and comments, all our attention towards each single word and punctuation and all the times our voices were one when sailing through the mystery of that book - they are all still alive in the world of memories. That's what "the end" truly means: the beginning of forever.