Pen to Paper

A few words on memory, attention, and the moments that refuse to stay.

You know that incredibly mundane saying, what is it, “Life is fleeting”? One of the most grating things about that statement is that it happens to be true. Each moment holds an exactness that can never be replicated. That truth both fascinates and terrifies me. It is because of this I find myself paused in the most ordinary of moments. Standing on the hillside next to my house, facing the wide open fields, feeling the gentle breeze lift my hair across my face. Breathing in the scent of sweet flowers carried across the street from my neighbor’s garden. Feeling the purr of my cat on my lap, gentle and steady in peace. My husband’s hand in mine, the callas on his finger tips from his guitar, the feel of his wedding band between my fingers, the way he gently caresses his thumb across the back of my hand. These moments, I just stop and drench myself in every piece of it I can hold onto.

To me holding onto those moments long after they are gone is the very definition of magic. To keep something so precious for all time, long after the flowers have gone dormant for the season, the breeze has turned into the storm, my cat has repositioned on the couch, and our hands have become wrinkled with time. Though they are still living intertwined, the moments of our youth will be gone like that breeze across the field. Photos are capable of not only showing us what it looked like, but when taken with a profound understanding of the heartbeat living in them, can preserve the feeling. This view of the world comes naturally to me, I don’t know how to not see.

I have spent my life noticing these little moments. I perhaps feel too deeply and love too hard, and I’ve been known to take things to heart, but this is what allows me to feel even outside of myself. I can feel the love between two people, the beautiful awkward moment when a stranger asks another to dance, the spark of beginnings, the unspoken laughter of a couple who has known each other for decades, the tears of a father symbolically releasing his baby’s heart to her love. I can see the truthful moments that reveal themselves as stories being told before my eyes. 

This is not a sales pitch, this is not a gimmick, this is not a marketing ploy. This is me. Finally putting words to the way I have always seen the world. There may never be another soul who reads this, but as I sit here at my kitchen counter on this very late night in my thoughts with my love, I am glad to put the world through my eyes on paper, just this once.