Missing something

The rain cycle is evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and collection before returning yet again to evaporation. As the Earth spins around the sun it creates spring, summer, fall, and winter before returning yet again to the spring.

However, the rain cycle is also precipitation, collection, evaporation, and condensation. The seasons can be summer, fall, winter, and spring. That's the point of a cycle, we choose where it begins and ends, as a cycle it has no ending, that's a quality we attribute to it to help us understand it.

Most people on this planet, they have at most one relationship that never ends. Relationship of the romantic kind. Otherwise they go through a cycle of meeting someone, dating them, caring for them, drifting apart, and going their separate ways before once again meeting someone. And, like all cycles, choosing to place the beginning at meeting someone, and the ending at going their separate ways, is something we attribute to the cycle. It makes as much sense as placing the beginning of the cycle at caring for someone, and the end with dating someone.

Some cycles though, are beyond the capacity of a human to fully grasp. Some cycles are longer than our lifespans. The carbon cycle involving the exchange of carbon between rocks and the Earth's surface takes over five hundred and fifty million years. It takes over four billion years for our galaxy to circle the nearest neighbouring galaxy. Some cycles are so long that to us humans, with our human lifespans, they don't look like cycles at all, they look like linear paths that go on forever.

Those first three paragraphs have been sitting in my files for years unposted. Written sometime after the end of my five and a half year relationship. They went unposted because they felt incomplete. Like they were missing something. That something, the fourth paragraph, has only come to me now.