Musings on a full life

So much of my life slips away without ever being imprinted on my memory. What I want to remember is waking up at least ten times to watch my two nieces sleeping next to me last night, or the way three and half year old Avi flung her arm across me, and snuggled her little body into my chest, or the way seven year old Kaia reached across her sister to hold my arm as she was going to sleep.

The expectant expression on Norval’s face the first time he presented a bouquet of flowers to me might not last forever in this fickle sieve of my brain. I might lose the feeling of my heart as it skipped a beat and then sped up the first time an editor of a magazine expressed interest in publishing an essay of mine (just this week!). I’m afraid the night that I helped Bianca paint the bedroom in her apartment a few months ago, and the respective life dilemmas we unraveled that night, will be sloughed off in favor of retaining some remarkable historical event. Will I remember the email my mom sent me this week that prickled my eyes with tears and dissolved any resentment I had about an issue we’ve been working through?

And so we feel love, devotion, excitement, validation, happiness, kinship and forgiveness. And when we come across them again, in the future, something tugs at the edges, a forgotten moment begging to be retrieved. Sometimes, the whole scene will rush back, and sometimes it remains the impression of a feeling, and not the event itself. The thing I may appreciate most about life, though, is that those lost moments will, most likely, repeat themselves in different iterations.

Someday, I will sleep with my own child and this first sleep over with my nieces will come rushing back. If I am lucky, I will see that same look on Norval’s face many times over as we grow together. The first time I get a job in the writing world, I suspect I will see that first email in my head and smile. I trust, despite the ups and downs friendships go through, that Bianca and I will share in some other connecting synergy and one of us will say, “Remember that night we painted in here and we joked about what a good lesbian couple we’d be?” And each time my mother and I find that we understand each other better than we already do, I suspect I’ll get a little teary.

The longer I live, the more I see that the common denominators of life – joy, love, companionship – will bestow their grace in perpetuity, so perhaps there is no need to hold on to any one of them as though they are in limited supply.