We Are Here

Rarely has a new phase of my life been so marked. This is not true. Apparently, I have the tendency to lean toward a remodel now and then, to strip the wallpaper and down to the scaffolding of my life. I restructure things but it does not mean the old does not remain. We are forever marked into one another lives even when we move on.

I can remember something you said in every single dress I own.

A few things I can say I already know about this place: there is always a bird, always sand stuck to the bottom of my feet, always windows open. I have been of want of things I now have, and then want what I had before. I am learning how to be where I am and not to be where I have been. Perhaps you were right and perhaps it’s a writers curse. Maybe I am only settled when I am unsettled.

The last six months feel like a fever dream and I have woken up somewhere else entirely.

There is a mild and sometimes urgent sense of forever in his presence that makes me tired, and I am more aware than ever before that I have both been here, and have never been here. Nothing is the same. Everything is the same. There are also always divers out front and I can sit and watch them swim, being pulled closer and to the shore one moment and pushed farther out to sea the next.

I imagine this might be what it feels like to love me.

I am one year older and I do not have anything special it say about it. I suppose this is because every day I am one year older than that day one year ago. What my birthday does make me think about though is my mother, and her being in the same stretch of time I am in now when she had me. Sometimes I imagine there are two separate linear stretches of time. In one I have a baby and in one I don’t.

We rarely understand the choices we make until it is too late to unmake them.