We all exhaust ourselves into the early morning hours with thoughts we should not tread on. We reflect on past days’ words, future years’ possibilities. These thoughts, mostly unanswerable, stretch into hours of intended sleep. We never learn our lesson: to empty our heads before we lay them on a pillow. Instead, we watch the night shift into shades.
Before bed the other evening, I had a few beers at a restaurant patio on Bolyston Street with him. This may be my last summer night, I thought. Growing up with a September birthday, I developed mistrust for this month with memories of irregular weather patterns.
We were talking about things we could do this fall. A hopeful anticipation for the upcoming season expressed itself through my teeth.
Then we were asking each other questions, the kind of questions people feel mortified when answering so they never ask. I challenged him: “What is the only thing you would change about us?”
We look for solutions, the course of action for change – the most promising word in the English language. But what do we do if there is no solution? What if we can’t undergo change?
His words were like snow in September: “The age difference,” he admitted.
I asked him for more. “I just wish we weren’t so far apart,” he elaborated, demonstrating a distance between his two hands. I dug for more but he kept it like a field in autumn. “It would make some things easier.”
And the thoughts I fumbled with when I laid in bed suddenly illuminated themselves like fire on shed leaves. A familiar crisp scent suffocated me again.
For a few elongated minutes of haze, this gnawed at my gut. If only my parents met years earlier; they were late newlyweds. Could I curse them for the year they brought me into existence? It was nearly twenty-one years ago to this day: her swollen with the symbol that made her a mother. Him: smoking, not ready to father.
All the possibilities of things we would never have flooded into my head in those brief moments. Time, the one thing I could not fix, sneered at me behind some clear yet insurmountable barrier.
The tragedy that keeps me awake into the early morning hours is the recognition that everyone you know, you will only know for the segment of time in which your life overlaps with theirs. And so often, it is your time of existence that limits you to see beyond this segment in any direction.
I will never know my mother when she was single and passionate. My father will never know me when I am fragile and aged. I will never witness my parents’ wedding day. And I will never be able to lie with my dinner companion, as I do now, when he was twenty-one.
My segment began too late.
At the end of those stray minutes, I caught myself and thought, this is possibly our last summer evening together. Take what you were given. If everything was a sunset, summer would extend beyond its three months, and I’d be ten years older. I suppose this is how we handle things we cannot change.
Before bed the other evening, I had a few beers at a restaurant patio on Bolyston Street with him. This may be my last summer night, I thought. Growing up with a September birthday, I developed mistrust for this month with memories of irregular weather patterns.
We were talking about things we could do this fall. A hopeful anticipation for the upcoming season expressed itself through my teeth.
Then we were asking each other questions, the kind of questions people feel mortified when answering so they never ask. I challenged him: “What is the only thing you would change about us?”
We look for solutions, the course of action for change – the most promising word in the English language. But what do we do if there is no solution? What if we can’t undergo change?
His words were like snow in September: “The age difference,” he admitted.
I asked him for more. “I just wish we weren’t so far apart,” he elaborated, demonstrating a distance between his two hands. I dug for more but he kept it like a field in autumn. “It would make some things easier.”
And the thoughts I fumbled with when I laid in bed suddenly illuminated themselves like fire on shed leaves. A familiar crisp scent suffocated me again.
For a few elongated minutes of haze, this gnawed at my gut. If only my parents met years earlier; they were late newlyweds. Could I curse them for the year they brought me into existence? It was nearly twenty-one years ago to this day: her swollen with the symbol that made her a mother. Him: smoking, not ready to father.
All the possibilities of things we would never have flooded into my head in those brief moments. Time, the one thing I could not fix, sneered at me behind some clear yet insurmountable barrier.
The tragedy that keeps me awake into the early morning hours is the recognition that everyone you know, you will only know for the segment of time in which your life overlaps with theirs. And so often, it is your time of existence that limits you to see beyond this segment in any direction.
I will never know my mother when she was single and passionate. My father will never know me when I am fragile and aged. I will never witness my parents’ wedding day. And I will never be able to lie with my dinner companion, as I do now, when he was twenty-one.
My segment began too late.
At the end of those stray minutes, I caught myself and thought, this is possibly our last summer evening together. Take what you were given. If everything was a sunset, summer would extend beyond its three months, and I’d be ten years older. I suppose this is how we handle things we cannot change.