Only Time Knows

The sun just rose above the mountain.

Light streams through the upper windows of Rez Art coffee house, where I sit with my computer reading old posts.

Reading about a different time, when we were a family of three, with one dog, and Elias rolled his way around Anchorage with his shiny metal walker, referring to himself in the third person: Yias want more. Yias want to pay outide. Yias want to ride an abater...

What about me? I can hear Olive saying. 

And I would tell her I didn't yet know she was possible. Didn't trust my body to carry a baby full term. 

Could never have imagined that we'd move to a gravel road over a hundred miles away from Alaska's medical hub, where the four of us--and two dogs-- would build a house overlooking Resurrection Bay.

Which makes me wonder what impossibilities will come to fruition ten years from today?

What will be resurrected from this particular moment in time?

As I sit here, squinting from the November sunshine, I am not the same over-scheduled thirty-something woman trying to come to terms with Elias's disabilities, as I juggled a hundred misshapen balls, unsuccessfully.

Often lying on the ground as they shattered on my head, bounced by my feet, splashed on my thighs, squashed under my eyes.

Today, I feel more at ease with the word "no", with a slower pace, with fewer titles, with a blank page, with silver hairs and smile lines.

 

I found a draft of a poem I penned last spring, that speaks to this feeling of acceptance that comes with age, if we're lucky enough to find it:

 

Between the marks

 

I can no longer smooth the two lines between my eyebrows

 

two lines like quotation marks

signs of expression

outer edges of voice

containment of speech

like something about to be 

 

said—a story perhaps

told in a voice emerging

a voice subverting

a story about a girl who isn't a coveted princess

nor a neglected stepdaughter

a tale about a woman who isn't a heroine

nor a home wrecker, someone 

 

who lines her face

with metaphors 

with meaning

her ink, her heart

she pens her life

on her forehead

 

her narrative arcs

but she still doesn't know

how the story 

unfolds

 

closing marks await...

 

So who knows where I'll be ten years from today. What Elias will be doing. Who Olive will become. The unimaginable that will take form--that will rise from the earth with solid lines, textures, and shadows of their own.

I hope I'll still be writing and sharing-- as the sun continues to rise, as dark spaces give way to light.

Comments

[Traci Shimel]

Hello, Christy!
I only know you through your blog. I love reading about your life...this struck me today. I see your writing building into fiction rather than non-fiction. I think the market is there - for special needs kids to read about kids like them, for siblings to read about families like theirs...just a thought for you. Keep writing!

[Christy]

I thought I like and will continue to think about--Thanks Traci:)