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This is what I cannot understand.

There is an understanding that nothing is ever black and white. Good can be achieved through bad means, what's wrong can sometimes be right, and if you turn right for long enough, you eventually go left. Boys can be girls who fall in love with girls who sometimes think they are boys and the lines between everything end up irreversibly blurred.

Or so I've always thought.

But this is a line that cannot be blurred. This is the only remaining clear-cut line that separates black from white as perfectly as a color wheel. And that is the fact that everything is until it isn't. We are until we aren't. We breathe until we don't. We live until we die. There is no gray area, no matter what the talk of doctors and comas and life support and brain death might say. Your heart beats until it doesn't.

This goes beyond just life and death. Emotions are until they aren't. As are moments, definitions, seasons. Two people falling in love, well, some of them inevitably crash land and then it's over. It's nighttime until daybreak. I'm an infant until I'm a child until I'm a teenager until I'm a young adult until I'm an adult until I'm middle aged until I'm elderly. It's spring until it's summer. And though it may seem like countless gray areas stretch between them, when you are unsure whether a man's appearing gray hairs deem him worthy of "middle aged" rather than "adult", there is always a moment. A clear, inarguable moment where everything changes. Where everything is until it isn't.

We buried my uncle seventeen years ago this February. He was eighteen and his life was punk rock, graveyard shifts at the gas station, the girl who got away who came back, and dreaming of getting out of his small town. That was his life until an off-duty cop went barreling through a red light and sent Jimmy careening through the windshield until he was nothing but a red stain on the right-most lane of Street Road. He was in the passenger seat until he was on the asphalt, and he was my uncle until he wasn't. I was nine months old and don't remember the sound of his voice. His acceptance letter to UCLA Berkley came three weeks after the rabbi from Beth Chaim unveiled his headstone.

Sometimes my grandmother looks at me with a reminiscent sort of melancholy and whispers to me "you are so, so like him." It's moments like these that keep me in front of mirrors for a split second longer than I should stay, so I can study my face and speak into the silence and wonder if I talk like him, if our eyes are the same color, if my teenage rambunctiousness is just what he left me in his astral will. Everyone is until they aren't. Jimmy was alive until he died. That is black and white. That was black and white until my grandmother saw him in me, and I became his gray area.