On Sundays we drink wine and eat crunchy fries fresh from the fryer at our local pub. It’s our way of clinking a glass to one another and holding eyes for more than a second to say we did it. You did it. She did it. We all did another week and came out better, with a few more tricks up our sleeves to warm her milk faster, a little more tired but most of all, more in love and in awe of the world we are creating together.
I’ve always been a highly sentimental person. When I was small I would hold onto things in an attempt to keep a moment or memory alive for longer. Like chewing gum wrappers to remind me of a specific flavour, or magazine covers to freeze a moment in pop news I really needed to preserve. I wrote in my diary religiously, recounting my day even when nothing particularly exciting happened. I listened to songs obsessively. I missed things before they had ended because I already knew how sad I would feel once they had.
I look back now and see myself constantly trying to catch a feeling and relive it again and again. I’ve written before about pre grieving, but this is not the same. This feels more like an overt awareness of the now. A feeling of wanting to keep it wrapped up tight, even though it will naturally grow too big and move too fast to hold.
These days, it isn’t gum wrappers, and it isnt necessarily about me. I find myself trying to hold onto the last light on a wintery walk. Or a song. Or her smile. Or a piece of silence with just one bird to break it. It feels like I want to clutch the tiniest simplest beauties so I can tell her all about it. My perspective has tilted towards a tiny person looking up at me, with hungry eyes ready to eat the world.
I hear a lot of where has the time gone? I can’t believe we are already half way through the year! And yes I do feel it in some way. But I also feel like I know exactly where it’s gone. And where it’s going. It’s in our hands as we hold her and rock her to sleep. It’s in our power naps that feel like nano seconds and most of the time really are. It’s in the half hour slots of the news that remind me when we should start running the water for her bath. I feel like I am more present now than I ever have been, and with that comes an eternal awareness of the time. Yes, it is flying. But now, I am trying more and more to be in it as it ticks, and remember where it goes.
Perhaps it’s in that dinner you took extra care to make for yourself or your family. Or that chapter of the book you are reading. That extra long shower. That walk you took that led you down that street you never knew existed. It may be in that confronting conversation you had to have. That cry you needed to get through your day. That phone call at work you dreaded that ended up not being so bad. It may have been taken by scrolling on your phone for way too many hours or letting your favourite show roll into the early hours of the morning.
Whoever and whatever I give my time to, that little collector in me is making sure I really watch it fly, so I can remember where it’s going.
Of course, with a side of fries.