Just call me Waldo.
Time is an odd, odd thing. Something different to everyone I think. I started rambling about something else, and as often happens, that opened the door to the other sides of the thing. That’s all I do anymore - wander in the forest of complexity that is life. All through my younger years, time was just that thing I couldn’t line up. I could remember events in my life, but I was never that person who could say “in 1982…” I could only ever approximate the order based on the where and what. I had a percussionist friend once tell me the first time he heard rhythm in sound he was 3 years old. My parents used to talk of “the blizzard of (insert year).” My life is just one big book with no numbers on the pages. Just chapters.
After I’d been married a handful of years to my current husband and begun to notice this was going to be more of a challenge than I had expected, I realized my slippery grip on time tended to give me a bird’s eye view of our relationship. That wasn’t always a positive thing, but it kept me here. I was always seeing all of him so when he hurt me, he did so with the power of every time he’d hurt me, and likewise when he made me happy. Happiness has always been more powerful with me. Thank the heavens.
Now I notice as I get older, time has taken on a different feel. That bird gained altitude and spread its eye beyond my immediate circle. It’s all one big library of story after story and the very air through which I fly is colored with the bittersweet beauty of it all. The Everything of it all. My story has at once become blissfully insignificant yet entirely necessary to the whole for every character takes us further through the book. It will be one of the countless, countless tales that have invisibly contributed to the progression of the story of us all. There’s peace in that…and sadness at all those before me I can never know…and awe at all the heartbreakingly lovely moments that must have been…and horror at all the unimaginable terror. It’s all there, in the footnotes and echoes that still resonate in our collective consciousness. All the faceless and nameless behind the representative few. Now when I lose someone, I see them fade back amongst that throng, and I desperately want to hold them and carry them forward as far as I can because they mattered and matter still. I didn’t lose just the mother or aunts, uncles, grandparents I knew. The whole of their story has passed away, their knowledge, experience, perspective, and I grieve that more than anything. I can’t seem to feel just one thing anymore with these notions in my heart. Every sweet is enriched with the bitter, every bitter softened by the sweet. It’s all just one big melancholy glory, and I’m wandering, lost and grateful for the privilege, but some days I miss that chapter of simplicity when my world was small and it never occurred to me it would ever really change.
After I’d been married a handful of years to my current husband and begun to notice this was going to be more of a challenge than I had expected, I realized my slippery grip on time tended to give me a bird’s eye view of our relationship. That wasn’t always a positive thing, but it kept me here. I was always seeing all of him so when he hurt me, he did so with the power of every time he’d hurt me, and likewise when he made me happy. Happiness has always been more powerful with me. Thank the heavens.
Now I notice as I get older, time has taken on a different feel. That bird gained altitude and spread its eye beyond my immediate circle. It’s all one big library of story after story and the very air through which I fly is colored with the bittersweet beauty of it all. The Everything of it all. My story has at once become blissfully insignificant yet entirely necessary to the whole for every character takes us further through the book. It will be one of the countless, countless tales that have invisibly contributed to the progression of the story of us all. There’s peace in that…and sadness at all those before me I can never know…and awe at all the heartbreakingly lovely moments that must have been…and horror at all the unimaginable terror. It’s all there, in the footnotes and echoes that still resonate in our collective consciousness. All the faceless and nameless behind the representative few. Now when I lose someone, I see them fade back amongst that throng, and I desperately want to hold them and carry them forward as far as I can because they mattered and matter still. I didn’t lose just the mother or aunts, uncles, grandparents I knew. The whole of their story has passed away, their knowledge, experience, perspective, and I grieve that more than anything. I can’t seem to feel just one thing anymore with these notions in my heart. Every sweet is enriched with the bitter, every bitter softened by the sweet. It’s all just one big melancholy glory, and I’m wandering, lost and grateful for the privilege, but some days I miss that chapter of simplicity when my world was small and it never occurred to me it would ever really change.
