Sand Lives in the Tide - New Lives and Last Breaths

Move is set. Next week. Things are going fast and Andrew and I are clipping along checking off checklists and arranging next steps while wrapping up the last. 

It's... whew. Something!

Chaya's been good about the move over all. We've had some really tough days, but in a lot of ways I think these are as much related to being off her schedule for various reasons and the sheer insanity of all that three week birthday blitz as it is and perpetual state of move-panic.

Everyone in the whole wide world  has observed that Chaya's stress is probably picked up from us/the energy of the move etc. Not that I haven't thought of this already

If I weren't occasionally having naptime overwhelm attacks and private sniffling drags, maybe Chaya wouldn't be literally biting me in the ass (just me, by the way and just the ass... seriously what??). But it's not a one-way street here. The days where Chaya is just average "scampish" I tend to be on it. It's the massive non-stop meltdown days that I find myself breathing into imaginary paper bags and shaken not stirred. A combo of factors of course.

All considered, we're all handling well.

But I'll say this. I feel like a friggin' different person every few hours about now. I feel blessed. I feel excited. I feel optimistic. And of course I feel overwhelmed. But damnit I also just feel lonely. I didn't expect that quite as much. But something about watching one life of sand wash away in the tides that gives you a sense of the infinite silence just this side of the noise. Even when you're doing it together, building something together, every farewell and every loss is a thoroughly private one.

But also, amidst the transcience.

My friend Laura is dying. Sure we all are in our various ways, but she's got a longstanding fatal diagnosis and a clock to wind through a matter of days to weeks on. She's asked to be left alone in order to spend these last minutes with her children. And so, my part in her life is concluded; in the power of hindsight was concluded several months ago. She's not gone, but we've said our goodbyes. I'll reach that next milestone when this final cocooning is concluded and the public mourning convenes. A strange interstitial time that hits me in waves throughout the rest of the emotional carnival

It also hits me that Laura's husband died the day that we moved into this house - some sick little bookending of our really magical time in Mount Vernon that makes me almost superstitiously afraid of our move. 

Laura and I kept in touch. I shyly proclaimed my love via messenger every few months. She tried to seduce me back into law. We maintained as people do when the timing isn't right but someday we'll connect again. The diagnosis a year ago left her life more insurmountable. I respected the space she requested from all of her friends as she thoroughly made the most of her remaining time with her children. Occasionally she still read something I'd written and commented, and my world lit up for just a little minute when I saw her little avatar in my notifications. I held onto the hope of a reunion. I understand that will no longer happen.

I can't even begin to parse what she means to me. What her passing takes will take with her. I untangle slowly and in pieces between sniffles and conversations with mutual friends.

But it roils that uneasy sense that sometimes sticks with me. In some ways we have these archetypal roles in our lives: friend, lover, child, mentor, colleague... They're necessary. We fit people to them as best we can, given availability and suitability. Life turns. The roles continue to be filled while others trip out of them along the merry-go-round. Something remains and haunts when there might have been more less or different.

So, this. It applies in a lot of different ways to a lot of different people right now.

What it Is/Was/Will Be

You? An absence that carries its own clamoring presence through the space of years.

What were you to me? What happened between us to etch your name in my deepest core?

Nothing happened. Nothing was. Not in any way to articulate. Life did its dance. A tanda. A crescendo and a coda. A litany of little moments. Meaningless, but for a very specific grouping of teeny data points arranged - like an origami toilet paper at a classy hotel - just so. We had "something" in rigid terms with a casual gloss, but that something wasn't it.

Who knows now what was; who we were; what we wanted. These selves mutually created in moments and evaporated in the space of a shy parting we didn't know was final. Who can speak for them?

Memory never served the past, being a vassal of the present's twists and turns. I can only stutter through stories that echo in the chamber of mirrors of a timeless & hovering self.

My heart never broke when your absence set in; some cracks filled with gold. Precious metal sits on the surface while the tiny fractures radiate beneath. A few deep pangs and some sparkling smiles. 

A tear or two to keep that twinkle when a certain twang of sound aligns just so with a sentimental scent in the air.

In that moment, I will wrap myself in the memory never knowing what is you and what is me. The merging that never was is internalized in the abstraction of memory's eternity. And when the deep inhalations of your essence fill my veins with the fizz of *you*, I'll know some hint of otherness that's somehow "coming home."

These feelings of absence/presence have been and will be what they are. Whatever that may be. Yes, more, yes, less. Defiant to my stabs at domination. Protean quivers begging me to immerse myself in their rapids and free float in their current. They cannot be tangled in the trowels of loquacity. Attempts to categorize barely breeze against the flow- small ripples and murkiness roil and fade.

Surely those feelings were wrought by the boundaries of the time-space-possibility surrounding them, but I learn in the passing of time that they were not mortally linked. As the boundaries change, they endure, evolving and flowing around the firm structures of reality.

I can't dally long with the what-could-have been. I can't imagine lives unlived. Secrets shared. No fantasy worlds can supplant the intangible sustenance of you within me. A longing that is its own end.

Only the presence remembered and concocted. The self and not-self. You and I are irretrievably enmeshed regardless of time, space or the possibilities that cut us off so tidily.

On a night just so - just like tonight - you fill my veins and the never-quite-was becomes my only reality.