Physicists say time is not a river.
Not really.
It only feels that way from inside the boat because we experience life moving forward, and not all at once.
But somewhere outside of us,
outside the clocks,
outside the calendars,
outside all our little human ways
of measuring everything,
everything exists at once.
Every version of every life.
Every kiss.
Every goodbye.
Every beginning.
Every ending.
Every ordinary Tuesday that later turns out to be sacred.
And if that is true,
then somewhere:
I am 5 years old... throwing my first baseball, dribbling my first basketball, learning to tie my shoes and ride my bike, having my mom and dad dry me off and hug me after a bath, and feeling my dad lift me into the canvas seat of a hang glider at my first air show.
I am 23, standing in my first classroom with books in my arms and impossible hope in my chest.
I am 16, being surprised by friends at a Pizza Hut right after learning to parallel park between a brick wall and my dad's temporary walker he has because he broke his leg.
I am 18, starting my first college basketball game, my teammate Rachel by my side as they announce us and we run to mid court before the game while my mom snaps photos immortalizing us because 9 months later Rach hydroplanes and dies two weeks before our sophomore year begins.
I am 36, depressed AF for the first time, wishing I was dead, wishing I had a gun that I'll never own to finish this life on my terms.
I am 45, losing my job one year before retirement, for reasons I will never know, wishing again someone would take me out of this life because I have never been gut punched so hard in my life.
I am 27, falling in love with a woman, really falling, letting myself go for the first time ever, with anyone.
I am 35 falling asleep in the Alps while my best friend tries to wake me up every 10 minutes to show me the most beautiful peaks on this planet.
I am 42, swimming with sperm whales, wondering how something so massive, so majestic would let me be their presence.
I am 38, running my first and only Ironman, 41 finishing Boston, 46.5 retiring, and after all three thanking a god I can't reconcile still to this day for getting me to all of these finish lines, but thanking her I stayed alive to see it all.
Yes.
The universe sighs time a new memory is immortalized,
as if the universe
had,
has,
will have
any obligation to us.
Yes.
Somewhere
I am boarding a plane.
Somewhere
I am standing in Senegal wondering how our Western, Christian nationalist nation cannot grasp just how poor the world is.
Somewhere
I am staring at a glacier trying to understand how something can be both ancient and moving.
Somewhere
I am running before sunrise training for a marathon.
Somewhere
I am laughing so hard I cannot breathe, lucky to have the best friends on earth.
And somewhere my dog, every dog I’ve owned, is asleep beside me.
Somewhere
I am dancing in a kitchen with someone who said I'll be with you forever, never leave.
Somewhere
I am kissing someone for the first time, kissing someone for the last time.
Somewhere...
I am kissing someone for the hundredth time. Pushing her up against the wall, kissing her mouth, her neck, her breasts— yes, every part of her body that she hates but I love because it belongs to her, running my hands all over her gorgeous skin, over and under her clothing before we make love
as if I have never touched her and made love with her
but have touched her and made love a thousand times before.
Somewhere
I am looking across a room and feeling that electric shift when one human being suddenly becomes different from all the others.
Somewhere? She is my now.
Somewhere, she is my past.
Somewhere, she is my future.
She.
Her.
Some years she is someone only people who have been single more than with someone understand:
She is ME. Myself.
Others, my favorite years of course:
she is someone I didn't, don't, never will get tired of coming home to.
The strange thing is we speak of the past as though it is gone.
The block universe says it isn’t.
What if every beautiful thing still burns exactly where it burned?
What if every version of me still exists where she always existed?
The teacher.
The traveler.
The runner.
The lover.
The woman whose heart is whole, so so full of love.
The woman whose heart is breaking.
The woman who has everything she wants but one thing that keeps eluding her.
The woman who discovers she can survive not getting it.
All of them.
Alive.
At once.
Like stars.
Like rooms in a house so vast I will never reach the end of it.
And maybe that is why certain people never completely leave.
Why certain years still glow and others bring me to tears.
Why some mornings arrive carrying entire lifetimes inside them,
and why everyone tells me I have lived 5 lives so far.
Because I have. I am. I will.
Because somewhere every conversation is still happening.
Every adventure.
Every sensual touch.
Every laugh that bent me in half.
Every person who changed me.
Every version of me they called into being.
Nothing erased.
Nothing lost.
Just living forever at its own coordinate, own pin in time.
And if the physicists are right,
then somewhere, right now,
I am still becoming.
Still teaching.
Still flying.
Still very very much alive.
Still falling in love.
Still being loved.
Still standing in the middle of a life so beautiful it took me forty-six years to realize:
I was never moving through it.
I was always holding all of it.
Every classroom.
Every mountain.
Every woman.
Every dog.
Every heartbreak.
Every miracle.
Every version of me.
Existing simultaneously
inside this impossible,
glorious,
unbearable but both awe-filled and wonderful thing
we call a life.
Yes.
Still standing in the middle of a life so beautiful it takes decades,
or perhaps light years,
to understand it was,
is,
always will be
mine.
No comments:
Post a Comment