The Rest Of It
When I was four, I would flatten myself onto the sidewalk and watch puddles reflect rainbows. Water carrying the sky, fractured by light. I remember holding my breath as if stillness could keep the colors from dissolving. They always did. A shift of wind, a passing step, and the surface broke. What was left was only the plain gray of concrete. The shimmer gone.
Even then I understood that beauty is brief. That it resists being kept. Love would echo that truth. Loss would etch it into bone. Death would seal it.
My childhood was magical. I believed the world was within my grasp. I climbed the magnolia tree in the backyard and sat beneath its canopy of pink and white blossoms. The air was heavy with sweetness, thick enough to taste. I told myself I would always remember, the way the petals drifted down and scattered across the grass, the scent that lingered on my hands after I let them go.
Summer was loud with cicadas, their drone bound into the heat. The swing waited at the edge of the yard, its chains cutting into my hands. I rose higher. The yard tilting. The sky too close. For a moment it felt like freedom. For a moment it felt like reckoning.
I kept chasing that suspension. The space between flight and landing. The instant where anything seemed possible. Childhood is measured in those fragments. We don’t realize they are already slipping away.
In many ways my childhood set me up for failure. I did not know that real life would arrive altered. That the world would not wait. Would not remain at my fingertips. I believed in everlastingness where none existed. I mistook continuity for guarantee. No one said that joy carries its own decay. That beauty is already vanishing. That every ascent is tethered to its fall.
I think back on this time when the present feels like confinement. When days perpetuate without release. When the hours move forward but nothing changes. I knew once what it was to believe the world was mine. I knew once the weightlessness before the fall. I thought wonder could be held if I was still enough.
Now I know better. Beauty does not stay. Love atrophies. Loss accumulates. Death is the constant. The body learns this before the mind will admit it.
I look at old photographs, and they seem like fiction. Faces lit with a light that had not yet been dimmed. The girl in the frame has no idea. She does not know how quickly innocence breaks. How easily the ground disappears. She does not yet understand that mercy is brief, that lament always follows. And yet she believed. I return to her sometimes, to mourn the tenderness she mistook for forever.
These days I run. Shoes against pavement. Breath sharp in my chest. The body pushes forward and the mind, for once, goes blank. Thought falls away. What remains is force. Pulse. I count the rhythm of each step, not as progress but as proof that I am still here. The air cuts, the muscles burn, and for a moment it feels like survival. Not grace. Not transcendence. Just the body moving because stopping would mean annihilation.
I keep running because stillness has become its own danger. Each step against the ground is defiance, each inhale a bargain. Cadence keeps the dark at bay, though what waits is relentless. I tell myself momentum is survival. That if I keep moving, I will not be consumed. The truth is simpler: I run away from ending. Not toward life. Away from memory’s insistence. Away from the gravity that accumulates in silence.
I tell myself I am searching for a way back. Back to radiance. Back to the shimmer on the concrete before it disappeared. But return is a myth. Memory does not keep faith with truth. It embellishes. Romanticizes. Adorns what is taken until what is left is a story of loss, not the thing itself. We spend our lives trying to step into what no longer exists.
Philosophers wrote of eternal return. Of cycles that bring us back to the same place. The same hour. But even if time circles, it does not restore. The magnolia does not bloom again as it once did. The girl I remember does not exist. What fades does not reappear.
The attempt to re-enter what has already ended becomes its own undoing. Each step toward the past only proves its distance. To long for what is lost is to live inside absence. To call it home.
Who I am has been arranged by forces I did not choose. Geography. Family. Accidents of timing. Small inheritances of temperament. Gestures passed down without naming. The self is less invention than sediment. Layers pressed down until they resemble identity, the wiring beneath carrying the current forward long after the source has been forgotten.
There is so much missing. Whole parts of a life unaccounted for. Hours that should have continued forward but ended too soon. Days that bled into nothing. And still my hands reach. Not for what can be touched, but for what might still be waiting.
I tell myself missing is only emptiness. That it can be borne. But it is density. It gathers. It settles in the body until reaching becomes reflex. Until wanting is the only language left.
There is no way back. What is gone stays gone. What breaks stays broken. I tell myself to move forward, but the weight drags behind. I tell myself to keep living but everything I touch reminds me of what used to be.
This is what survival looks like. Not triumph. Not renewal. Only continuing when continuing feels impossible. Only rising each day into a life remade by what has been taken. Only standing inside the ash. Still breathing.
