Where Footprints Fade
It is a humbling thought that we spend years building moments destined to dissolve, loving people who must one day leave, and becoming memories ourselves in someone else’s fading mind. The laughter we once filled the air with, the dreams we fought for and kept close to our hearts, the pain we endured and carried as proof of being alive, all of it softens, then slips away. The road forgets our steps, and the wind carries away even our names.
The world moves with a strange indifference. Seasons come and go, faces pass and vanish, and the earth forgets the weight of every foot that walked upon it. We leave traces of words, gestures, memories believing foolishly that they will last. But time, with its patient cruelty, erases all things. Where footprints fade, we are left face to face with life’s quiet, merciless truth that nothing lasts forever.
Yet, perhaps it is this very fading that gives meaning to our brief presence. What would love be, if it were eternal and if people lived forever? It is its vulnerability and the fragility of human life that makes it precious- the knowledge that every embrace is finite, that every shared moment is on borrowed time and maybe that is what saves us , that nothing lasts long enough to lose its wonder.
We mourn the passing of moments, but their impermanence is what makes them shimmer while they last.
Still, the heart resists this truth. It aches for permanence, for something that will not vanish at dawn. We bury our footprints deeper, hoping time will be kind this once. But the rain comes anyway, washing away the evidence of our belonging. Even memory betrays us, the faces blur, the voices fade. What remains is not what was, but the ache of having once had it. There is sorrow in this, a quiet futility that shadows even the brightest joy.
And yet somewhere within that futility, a small, stubborn hope survives. Perhaps it is the only rebellion we have against oblivion. The hope that even as everything fades, something unseen endures. Not the footprint, but the motion of walking. Not the word, but the silence it leaves behind. Perhaps meaning is not in permanence, but in the tenderness with which we inhabit our transience.
Nature corroborates all this. Flowers bloom only to die, yet the garden remains alive with their memory. The sea erases the shore each night, yet returns unfailingly in the morning. Stars collapse, but their ashes give birth to new constellations. Everything ends and yet, somehow, everything continues.
So we walk on, knowing that we will be forgotten, but walking anyway. We love, though loss is certain. We build, though time will dismantle it. We dream, though dawn will scatter it. Because even if the footprints fade, for a moment they were there- warm and real.
And maybe that is enough.
Maybe beauty was never meant to last; it was meant to remind us that we could feel. That we could stand against the inevitable and still choose tenderness. That we could know the truth of impermanence and still, somehow, dare to love.
As night settles over the world, the path grows smooth again. The footprints are gone, the noise has quieted, the day has folded itself into memory. But somewhere in that stillness, the heart understands that what vanishes is not wasted. The fading is not failure,it is fulfillment.
Because the footprints were never meant to stay.They were meant to remind us that we once walked and that, for a brief, luminous moment, we were alive.
Muneeb Afzal, JKAS Officer
