A few nights ago, I heard my son laugh from upstairs. The laughter tinkled merrily down the stairs from up high to down where I was standing in the kitchen. It was the laugh of a four year old – giddy, unrestrained, and in those chucklesome, high-pitched, and somehow fairy-like tones that only children that young can achieve.

That night I heard the free, sincere, heartfelt laughter of my son, and I had a thought, suddenly. It hit me without consideration and washed over me harshly. It did not care what I was doing when it came on, or where it would leave me after it fled into the night beyond me.

And the thought was this:

There will come a day when I will not be so privileged as to hear that sound anymore as a common occurrence in my life, my day to day What Is, my moments possible to take for granted (even though I don’t want to). There will come a time when that laugh does not even exist anymore.

There will be a day when forever more I will not be able to hear that sound. His laughter will still be accessible to me (sometimes) but it will never sound that way again. It will become lost forever in the vault, deep and wide and sometimes difficult to navigate, that contains my lifetime of memories.

And memories have this awful way of fading and being so hard to recall in a tangible way, so hard to truly feel in the same way as they were once experienced.

I stood there, at the foot of the stairs, frozen in that moment. I stood there, playing that brief sound over and over in my head, savoring it. I was all alone, and may have nearly appeared catatonic in that moment of true consideration and revelation.

Braden may never know that he’s ever done something so simple but so incredibly and effortlessly meaningful that it captivated his mother so greatly. He might not realize that she once stood quietly relishing the joyous beauty of a 3 second laugh he uttered about a little bit of something more than nothing that faded into the night without him giving it another passing thought.

When I write these moments, it is like I’m drawing a map to put up on the inside of that vault, so that when I dive into it later, so much later, maybe I can find these most important of thoughts and feelings, these memories of the most golden days, and hold them near me again for a few moments.

And I will know.

And now you do, too.

once upon a time on Valentines day I got a wonderful present

confirmation that you existed

the world has looked different every day since then

sometimes more fierce, sometimes softer, in spite of itself

because of you

the days have flown faster than I ever knew they could

and despite what I say about wanting you to slow down

i am also eager to see who you will be tomorrow

and the day after that

and the days and months and years after that

i know that before long

in fact
it will seem
like the blink
of an eye

i will have my answer

so many of these flying days will stack up against one another

that you will be a man

a man!

but for now I still get to be your hand holder and your scare chaser

your cheek kisser and your hair smoother

the one who you wake up in the morning and who puts you to sleep at night

and I get to sit by you at the table and watch you

as you flex your muscles while eating a carrot

your eyes lighting up with imagination and magic as you say

i will eat my vegables and then i will grow to be a strong, big daddy!

and then i will be a growned up!

right, mommy?

yes, baby
one day

but not yet today.

Happy Birthday, my beloved!
The world may sometimes seem fierce

but it will never be quite as fierce as you.

Love, Mommy

The further we go in, the more painfully aware I am of the no rewind button on my kid.

Totally still need that sticker on my forehead that says “appreciate today.”

(And pie, I really, really need chocolate pie. But that is another story entirely. I think I just cheapened this post? Fuck it. I’m sorry.)

and i seem to have blinked.

the very next moment, i opened my eyes upon this:

and that is both intensely beautiful and horribly frightening to me.

Elementary school lunch wasn’t important, it was just another thing that happened every day, in the same place, with the same people. I don’t need that information anymore. It has to have been crowded out by important things, I think. But instead of fishing a boot or an old tire out of those polluted waters, when I close my eyes I see into my mind, as if through the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean. It is almost like I am actually standing outside that cafeteria, looking in through the rectangular windows at rows and rows of tables, each one lined with chattering children.

Then suddenly, I’m not standing outside the windows anymore. In a flash, I’m inside the room where the ambient noise rises ferociously with the spark of my transition. Utensils scrape across and smack into plastic, segmented tray plates that clink against one another and slide along table tops and counters in search of final resting places. Chairs scratch the floor both meeting and departing table tops, as diners come and go. Bags, books, and other items thump and bump as they drop into waiting places, becoming items of secondary importance now that the task at hand is eating, socializing.

Above and beyond these sounds there are the types of audible events that come only from the mouths of humans: talking, laughing, yelling. The majority of this is of the child variety, mostly high-pitched, squeaky, and giggly. Most of the yelling is happy, jovial, prankish. Occasionally, there’s an angry yelp or an adult admonition. The overarching effect of the mingled, youthful voices in all of their utterances is a feeling of busyness, of pleasant fellowship and mirth.

I feel, in my mind, as if I’m standing there, having entered suddenly, but still separate from all of this, just taking it in with my eyes closed. But the deeper I go, the more I process. I’m allowing myself to sink into those waters and wade out to a place where eventually there’s a drop-off. I’m going to fall right in.

It happens, and the next transition hits me with cool, hard plastic under my posterior. My legs dangle towards the floor, and I grasp a metal fork with curiously uneven tines in my right hand. The fork is poised over a pretty ugly example of fruit cocktail.

The cocktail isn’t half as bad as the rectangular piece of gooey mess masquerading as pizza. I know this and at the same time, I also know I love this disgusting mockery of a real pie, just as I love the grease laden tator tots that neighbor it in the adjoining tray segment.

I look up and now I’m taking in a sea of faces at my level. Instantly I’m overcome with emotions that blast me almost simultaneously: wonder, excitement, insecurity, awkwardness, need, desire, invincibility.

This is youth, glorious youth. I have more than just miles to go; there’s a path stretched out in front of me to what seems infinity.  All I can see is shining horizon and I know that forever is just over the hill up ahead.

For a moment the sounds disappear. For a heartbeat every smell of sickeningly delicious grease puddled over cheap cheese on soggy crust is undetectable. The cool, slick cardboard milk carton under the curled fingers of my left hand disappears. All the children move in slow motion.

I feel like a time-traveler in my own mind, and for just that one moment, there’s a distinct and deep pain that knifes through me, witnessing this slice of my past, this irrelevant little reenactment of an any-day sometime so long ago in my life.

I want to stand up and scream, “We are all here again! Back here again! Have we made mistakes!? Let’s do better this time!”

But then it all rushes back in with its loud busyness, its irreversible hurrying of children forward into their fates. For a moment, I feel defeated, and then I blink my eyes, and it all swirls away like bath water that flows down the drain, pulling away both the bright, gleaming bubbles and the dirty scum that once clung to you, in the same smooth motion.

As I open my eyes in the here and now, I reflect on that moment at the end, that painful longing to hit the “restart” button. But I’m here, for better or worse, and it’s okay if I can’t change the things my little self so worried about for that brief spell inside my mind. She forgot for a beat that out here on the other end, I’m not too shabby, and even the mistakes have had a hand in making me who I am today. No regret.

Well, I do kind of wish she had grabbed one of those tater tots and slammed it. This lagging metabolism is a bitch.

******

Today’s post is my answer to The Lunch Box, a writing challenge at {W}rite-of-Passage.

The following people took the challenge, too.