Inklings//Seedlings

“This peach looks like a universe.”

Time Bomb

Charles Simic, poet and genius, wrote a piece on aging for the New York Review of Books called "Looking It in the Face". Until days before his 50th birthday, he'd forgotten to feel old; or rather, the notion hadn't ever occurred to him. It's strange, because just last night I was thinking about time--how heavy and important it is, how monumental because it is so fleeting. 

"I go and squint at my face in the bathroom mirror and don’t like what I see," he says of waking at four o'clock in the morning after hours of tumultuous near-sleep. How strange not to recognize oneself in the mirror, to feel so different than the vessel we inhabit. But when does the inevitable morph into the actual? At the sight of the first pronounced wrinkle, jowl, or gray hair? Or does it happen so gradually that quick glances can't register the enormity of our mortality? I imagine it's the latter. The last time I saw my mother ride a bicycle, her helmet sliding over her small forehead and at an angle, I laughed.
                                      "You look like a child," I said.
                                      "We all are," she answered.

Time Warp

I escaped from New York two weeks ago to the quiet of Virginia and slipped back into a world and pattern not so different from the one I left a decade ago. The trees still stood in their places, a little thicker and taller. I'd forgotten some of the road names, but never the routes. Right at Shore Drive still led to the ocean, 7-11 still trusted its patrons enough to leave the Slurpee machine unattended, its swirls of sugary ice so perfectly watery I drank two in a single week. You could wave three times in a parking lot to strangers who held doors, nodded in the heat, or smiled. It was like stepping foot on a set that hadn't cleared once the heavy velvet curtain dropped its weight. My lines came back slowly, the role revised with the alacrity of a method actor who smells smoke for the first time in months, in pangs, with pressure and lightness all the same.