When I see initials carved into a table, I always wonder if the people are together.

Did "A&M", their initials forever wed in the holy matrimony that is vandalism, stay together? Was their small felony worth it for the eternal bliss that is love? Or did "Mary and Alex, 2014" make it past the year 2014? By scratching your initials into the smooth skin of a table, you're ensuring that those initials will stay there until either the table decomposes, or the Universe does.

Did "Claire and Johnny", who carved their names into an evergreen remain evergreen? Or were they merely barking up the wrong tree? Even more, I wonder if the relationships of those vandals are happy. If their small moment of passion in which they engraved their intertwined souls into the dead oak of a coffee shop table was actually worthwhile.

Are A&M unhappily married? Perhaps M took a job that he couldn't stand and A started gaining a lot of weight, and suddenly they were fighting over bills, and only touching each other for long enough to feel the disdain seep through their skin.

Did Mary and Alex ever marry? It would be somewhat ironic to marry Mary. Or at least it would be quite contrary. Did one go into the army, murdered in combat, with the other only having the letters they had written to each other? Will Alex one day go to that old bar that they both used to love, look down, and see Mary's name and begin to sob?

You will inevitably forget about that small engraving. You will go on with your lives, possibly separated, or if you're lucky, blissfully together, but the engraving will forever live on. Eventually, that little hidden restaurant you both loved so dearly closes it's doors forever, and that table with its faded stick and poke tattoo will find itself in the garbage. But as it is hauled to the dump, it will still carry your initials. Until maggots eat away at the remnants of your beloved engraving, or until the wood splinters into fine pieces. Then the seal will be broken, the passion will end, and you two can truly be separated from each other.

But it's sad to think as I look around at the tables in my little campus coffee shop to think of how many of those names are no longer conjoined. How once those people thought of one another with such desire, with such undying love, but now remain separated like oil and water.

It's so strange to make something so permanent, when there is nothing permanent about human nature. We can shave our heads bald and then grow our hair back out into fields of wheat. We can travel up mountains and down rivers, or just stay completely stagnant and watch the world fly by like cars on the interstate. But that table, will forever sit bearing the scars of a love once embraced.

I see couples in the park engraving their names into a tree, and I can't help but think to myself what an oath they're making to one another. Even with friends, i've never felt such a connection that I could write our names in between the bark of our favorite oak tree, the ones that we played on as kids. I fear that nothing I love is so permanent that I could ever allow it to live on in such a way.

Memories can be drank away. They can be forgotten once shinier, prettier memories come along, shining too brightly to share any form of spotlight with those old reliable thoughts and feelings. But if there is something to keep those memories alive, a memento, a thought, a dream, then those memories regain life.

You can't be free of your ghosts, of those things that haunt you. Of those things that you once believed would last for all of time. But what is time? A linear progression? Something cyclical? It's very hard to imagine. But a lifetime, or several lifetimes, we can imagine that. That is something that has happened, that there is proof of. And one day those initials in all of their dark, brazen glory, will find their way into our shrines. Into the places that we hold dear, where we attempt to make some connection with those that came before us. And the one thing that will live on, is our sentimentality. Our belief in things lasting forever, or at least in our wish that they would. That by slicing each sharp, ink dripping letter into the flesh of the wild Oak, that maybe we can hold onto something that we want. To the things that we wish never to leave us.

So "A&M" carved their names into this beautiful little table I've found to be a home for the last half hour. So "Mary and Alex 2014" lived on through the dark etchings on this solid plane. To think that love can end, that the things that make life worth living can be gone from us is too hard to think about on a daily basis. One cannot think of the death of things too often, or they will lose the meaning of life. And so we permanently emblazon our love into the world around us.

We get tattoos of names, we talk about "forever homes", we buy each other stars from websites that seem more than a little sketchy, and we write down the permanence we feel into our tables. For though we are but a follicle on the massive, all-knowing skull of the Universe, we wish to be something so much more permanent. We don't feel fleeting, we don't feel impossible, we feel like we can last forever. And what is a life without love? What is an existence without another existence to coincide? Perhaps, even though they may not have lasted forever, the love that those lovers shared will forever be remembered by the knowing oak of an empty table in a coffee shop. And perhaps, in that way, they are permanent. At least I will remember them.