We’re balancing precariously.
The ground is warm beneath our feet, the days propel us forward without encouragement, relentless and rhythmic. We can’t stop even if we wanted to.
Sometimes the routine feels permanent, cast in stone, like we’ll still be waking up in our three story walk up after our hair has gone gray and our bones threaten to betray us. Like there will always be another hour, another day to live this way, immortality for our handmade family. Maybe there will always be more questions than answers, and every conversation from now until forever will truly end with the indisputable “anything could happen” and the mystifying “who knows where we’ll be?”
Other days the routine feels fragile, and the slightest deviation from the norm threatens to knock us all off balance. We’re holding onto what was, mimicking as best we can the days when our entire existence was contained by a single square mile. The days where nothing made much sense because it wasn’t supposed to are becoming harder to remember now, between the bills we pay on time, the way our brows furrow at the sight of a parking ticket, and the nights we take ourselves home early because nothing sounds closer to bliss than loose fitting pajamas and the forgiveness of our own beds. The changes appear like fractures, painful and surprising. Sometimes I see us splinter.
What started in the pastel colored living room of a thirty bedroom colonial on a sleepy Midwestern street can be followed to many corners of the world, a web of invisible, intersecting and at times indivisible threads that are knotted together in our favorite places. When the future burns my fingertips and the past catches in my throat I like to think we’ll always be able to follow the line back to each other.
We’re drifting in different directions, but none of us are off course, not really. It’s hard to see that sometimes, like the moments when I pause and notice that the girl I’ve walked many miles with has started to run and soon she’ll be moving so fast that I’ll have to squint to see her. I wonder where she’s going in such a rush. I’ll ask myself what’s wrong with the length of my stride. I’ll feel abandoned, even sorry for myself, and I’ll wonder what I’ve done to make her go. And then I’ll look down and realize that I’m running, too.
In a few months I’ll watch two of my closest friends on their wedding days.To know my friends have found forever is both astonishing and entirely expected. Astonishing to know that I’ll bear witness to a promise that transcends time and space, that supersedes professional obligations and opportunities, that outweighs and outlasts disappointment and fear and shame and anger, that transforms what was once one heart beating for one person into one that beats for two. Entirely expected that as I bear witness my subconscious will pull at the edge of my dress and whisper “but you’re only thirteen, go sit down with your parents and let the grown ups get on with it.”
I’ll bear witness as my friends cast certainty into a future they know nothing about and trust that the way time weathers them and their partners will only reaffirm the love that first sparkled in their young, effervescent eyes, a love they managed to catch between the spaces of their interlaced hands and hang on to. I’ll bear witness to the fact that there is no greater gift than his and her idiosyncratic love, and the mesmerizing way it binds together even those filling the seats around the alter with yet another invisible knot.
So we’ll continue to splinter, to divide and multiply. We’ll continue to run our own way, maybe sometimes right into each other. We’ll continue to predict certainty in the uncertain, to assume fallibility in the infallible. We’ll spend more time wandering alone, because we’ve realized that the unnamed puppet master that was pulling the strings for so long doesn’t waste his time on minds that have imagined more, on bodies that have grown taller than his reach. But perhaps too, we’ll spend more time making promises to the ones that matter, the friendships and relationships that have withstood our growing pains and our solemn vows. Maybe, even as the thread wears thin and strains against the distance and the boyfriends and the husbands (!) and the jobs and the bucket lists we’ll swear to always love and cherish the people that remind us of the way life sparkled in our young, effervescent eyes, of the freedom we felt inside of not knowing. We’ll promise that no matter how time weathers us, or how tired we get from all of that balancing, from all of that running, we’ll come back to each other as best we can, anyway we know how. Maybe it would help if we made that promise and cast certainty into a future we know nothing about. Because really, who knows where we’ll be? Anything could happen.
itsalmostmonday 