Sitting on the couch after everyone’s gone to bed. Locusts and waves the only sound – the week
behind living in you. Your skin’s new
shade the only outward proof. Your
favorite book has been on a shelf here all along, and as you pick it up and reacquaint yourself
with the old friend, the stillness sets in.
The wholeness, the culmination of it all. This is what you break your heart for. What you lay awake for. What you put on a
face and go to battle every day for.
It’s all worth it for this moment right now – sitting next to coolers full of
leftover food waiting to be crammed back into cars traveling north. Next to trash bags full of bottles and
cardboard awaiting the curb. The signs
of having lived a week with the most important humans in the world. The luck of it all. It’s the calm before the storm – but also the
ending really. Because nothing will ever
be this way again. And even more than
the melancholy that brings, there’s a beauty in it. A unique truth to it; that next year won’t
and can’t be the same. Nothing ever
will. This moment in time is all its
own.
Someday you’ll look back at pictures and something will
spark in your being. And maybe you won’t
remember the exact words spoken, but you’ll remember the feeling. You’ll remember the fears. What you wanted. WHO you wanted – and you’ll take comfort that
you were. That you are. That the two versions are existing simultaneously
right now, and by all means will continue.
We require such landmarks in life. To bring us back. Away from subways and spreadsheets and bars
of strangers. To ground us with the
large smallness of nature and familial love.
But also to serve as a stake in the ground when we’ve lost our identities in the noise and motion. Our minds scanning backwards…skipping over the anonymous moments, we land on this quiet
little pocket when we really were.
