Another sum.
As a child, I had this plan of where, who, and what I would be in the future. I had this vision for myself, and for some reason it ended at age twenty-seven.
It just stopped.
It was this familiar, close-by and simultaneously out of reach sensation. Twenty-seven seemed so tangible. It always blew my mind to conceptualize my whole life in the form of numbers.
How old would my parents be when I reached a certain age?
How many years before I was a teenager who could drive?
What year would it be when I am the age my parents were when I was born?
Where would I wind up?
What would I do?
How many lives could I live within my lifetime?
Once I actually hit twenty-seven though, I didn’t know what laid on the other side. I presumed death frequently, and when that didn’t come – it was then that I felt myself begin the perpetual motion of continuation.
Work, friends, men, holidays, repeat. And it’s within that constant motion that the joy I once found in number games began to move too quickly.
Time sped up, the further I Traveled through it.
Summers used to last forever. They consisted of the amount of books I could read, climbing trees, and discovering new things.
Now the summers seem to fly by, without a care in the world that I am over here trying to enjoy it. Even though it’s May now, I can’t believe that in the last year I moved from my home in Wisconsin to New Mexico to Texas, and soon I will be in the mountains of California. The things that I have seen and done leave me longing for more.
I want to be everywhere all at once.
So, I am on the verge of
ANother
summer AND
another sum.
& It’s the first time I am free FALLING IN TIME.
…and also alone for the first time in my journey. All of the things I once placed gently into the palm of another, are in my own hands.
Things are quieter, certainly.
The sway of the trees and the way the sunlight hits their dancing tops – are no longer wrapped in the emotions of another, but they are wrapped into my own.
Imagining where-to-next isn’t hazy with “maybe this isn’t right.”
Where - to is carved along diverging paths, which continue to present themselves to me, and they have all led me to here, now.
And soon it will still be here, now.
