Four Days Away

A long postcard

I’m getting married in four days and living across the street from my elementary school. Approximately every hour I hear the same bleat of the bell that I heard at eight years old, and walking the dog, I pass the playground with the same blue swings, the same wood chips, the same monkey bars I remember hanging on until my hands blushed and burned. It’s a gift to walk by and wave at my former self, and I wonder, who is the ghost, her or me? Like if I go back in time with enough focus, I’ll see myself passing by at recess time.

In between writing name cards and smearing my eyes with gold glitter, I watch the moonrise twice, once with my parents, once with friends. Both times, a bloody orb hangs over the lake, and the wind whips the sand into my hair, the waves big enough to be oceanic. Again, this scene is one I’ve lived before, this dramatic precipice that is almost September. I’m about to leave town for a while, the mornings turning cold enough to see the first yellow leaves. I’m nineteen and nine and twenty-nine. I’ve lost my first love; I’ve found the love of my life. I’m leaving for camp, for college, for grad school. I’m full of nerves and joy. It’s almost time.

I love the liminal space, the anticipation of almost. I meant for this post to be about weddings and marriage but it’s almost certainly turning out to be about time bending, the new shapes it makes as it does.

At the end of July I went on a ten day silent meditation retreat, something that I swore I would never do because it scared me so much. No screens, no reading, no writing, no music. There, I learned to smooth my jagged mind, to pause before reacting. I watched butterflies and muskrat and rabbits with their ears lit pink with dawn light. I watched a storm rolling in, watched bugs crawl the walls of my white stucco room. I returned and wept to this song, the sheer beauty of music itself, that music exists. I did not miss writing or reading or talking at all. I loved having nothing to do but listen.

The ecstatic state after ten days of silence has long left me, and I’m back to tending to the details and bumps of every day life, checking my phone, worrying about things I can’t control. But I’m left with the sheer beauty of this precipice, with more space around it. The sheer beauty of all my past lives here in Chicago.

The moment is always now and always ongoing. That’s what I tell D when we drive to Indiana to visit my parents. My journal remains blank, my hands are still. I don’t want to write it all down, I just want to live it. Every morning at sunrise, I watch mist rise from the manmade lake, watch the turtles and hawks. The tendrils of cloud ebb and collect, tiny tornadoes of fog. They move like some great hand is stirring the sky.

No moment is exactly the same and I want to be there for all of it. Walking down the aisle, packing our boxes, boarding the flight. I’m the ghost, the writer, walking through my life, thinking how beautiful, before stepping inside, into the realm of the living.

xo

Raisa