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Time is an unfair friend
It’s insistent march bringing me all that I have and ripping everything away, piece by piece, minute by minute.
I have felt the cruelty of it’s cadence with every fiber of my being recently. It’s more than a reluctance to march in step, it’s a knowing rising up, a certainty that I was made to float free of it’s constraints. It feels like all the movies and books you have ever read of time travel, where the characters get stretched and torn almost limb from limb as they are hurled from one era to another. And then they are there, in one piece, miraculously. And that strain is weighing on my bones, because why is it any less epic that we should travel half a decade or more on this globe, constantly gaining, changing, always losing… til we end – poof – in a puff of smoke. It makes no sense and yet this is how we live. Imprisoned.
The other week I was floating so full of life I felt as if I could step right out of my skin. Eternity felt close, just on the other side of a scarf drawn thin across our eyes. I walked the sidewalk imagining the real me, stepping right out and into all we can not see, right into his arms, into the arms of all who we live apart from. But we don’t join hands between this world of time and forever stretching on. I can’t even grasp a single instant and command it to stay in this world of clocks and earth. If new days didn’t spring up I would not know my children. Yet the sun falling from it’s place over and again steals away everything I call my own. Life a constant mourning of all that goes away. The baby’s laugh as fleeting as a summer breeze. Nothing can we quite hold in our hands, it’s all just slipping through.
But who would want to live in a stale moment? The leaves fall and new winds bring seasons as they should be. A string of family photographs. memories filed away, thoughts, sensations piled up and forgotten. My heart torn to see the days fade like old film and thrilling to hope of what may come.
My baby turned two and all he wanted to do was go on a train. We hurtled through night and day. Looked out the windows and saw only ourselves and streaks of light like nymphs racing into eons. I want to hold him to my breast forever, how can I survive the day he no longer climbs upon my knee? I’m afraid to know him as a man. Who will he be? But I long for him to wrap strong arms around me and tell me he remembers our story and that it is a good one.
And deep inside I know the saying is wrong. They say you can’t take it with you. I know it’s all coming along for the ride. As we whir past train stops, I know the bad and the pain will fade away. And I will be left with the good. He has given it to me. The beautiful moments are forever mine. Nothing else will matter.
9-7-12 . canon ae / tri-x
