on time

a prayer for forgiveness, an homage to presence

take me to the river.

I’m not late for appointments. Never late picking up the kids, rarely late dropping them off. I make routines that fit into my life so I can show up for everything else on time. Wake up before the sun. Light a candle. Downward Dog. Warrior Two. Peaceful Warrior. Plank. Plank. Upward Dog. Chattarunga. Mountain Pose. Take a shower. Walk into Rafi and Luna’s room, open the curtains, raise the blinds, and welcome them into a new day. Tell them I love them. Feel that love in my veins. Make breakfast.

Chop wood, carry water.

I’ve noticed my jowls in photos lately. A mark of time. How my face slowly travels south. Does my face want to move to another place on my body? Do I look like I’m frowning, I wonder. While my gray hair has seemed premature for many years, now that I am 48, it’s completely age-appropriate that it would bear the absence of color. Even the color of my hair is on time. How wallpaper facing an eastern window also shows its age. The seams turn yellow, but the wall, still standing strong, looks worn.

I am on time for almost everything. Everything, except my life.

To the idea of my life. Like a painting, I imagine it as a wide landscape covering the terrain of various habitats. Marshlands and meadows, hillsides, jungles, and glassy lake shells. By now, I have done some of the things I thought I would. Jumped off rocks into a wild tide. Watched a mother quail shepherd her baby quails, so surprisingly tiny, through overgrown grass. Solstice grass. Finished college despite not really knowing how to learn in a classroom. Even went to graduate school. I wrote a book, but that was almost twenty years ago, so I’m not sure whose fingers were putting words onto those pages anymore; perhaps she receded into the forest from which this version of me emerges. I married someone I met in detention when I was fourteen in our backyard, twenty-one years later—I almost fainted before reaching the altar. Filled our home with altars. Gave birth to two humans. Worked for people and with people. It’s important to make the distinction; they are not the same. Attended weddings and funerals in equal measure. Learned to be quiet. Stopped drinking alcohol and even started to understand why. Relished eating alone and enjoyed eating with others. Chronicled a year spent hovering above the earth, as though the world, after all this time and science, is indeed flat, and all I could do was tether myself to the edge for my life, anchored by the words passing above me like clouds.

I paid my bills on time.

But I feel late. Late to my work in the world and all the experiences I thought I’d have by now, contributions I wanted to make, all the places I hoped to have visited, and people I wished to have known. As though there is a giant clock tick tick ticking away, hands making their way closer to the great alarm, the one that holds all the endings and all the beginnings. But whose hands am I trying to keep up with or outrun, I cannot tell.

Because I haven’t been here, on this page, for a while, I hoped to return with something I had found while I was gone. Making something important and useful with all this time away. Rather than being here, I’ve been gathering something in the field, tending to its growth, beauty, and resonance. And upon my return, all I can offer is more field — a whole expanse running the length of life until now, but not a millimeter beyond. Some call it presence. Depending on the time of day, the location of the sun in the sky, the tides, and the phase of the moon, it’s true, I am here at its altar, staying in its river.

Trusting that it might deliver, direct, and hold me in its current.

We’re approaching twelve months post-transplant for Fonz. How there was no faster way to get here, or a checklist to contain the multitudes, proof of all the ground we covered. He received his stem cells on June 28th last year. And like everything else, we had no roadmap guiding our arrival 365 days later. There will be no one waiting at the gate. No team of nurses with a “rebirthday” cake barging into our hospital room to celebrate the way they did a year ago on the same day. How they disoriented us with their lightheartedness, like putting a blindfold over our eyes and spinning us around. Wobbly and blind to every step that lay ahead, with no choice in the matter, we set out on the path in spite of it all. But here, a week out from an anniversary we aren’t sure how to commemorate, it seems to simply want to mark an honest passage of time, like bookends to a brutal and beautiful year.

Like a life-sized scavenger hunt, I’ve gone searching for the artifacts of time passing that I can hold in my hands.

But by now, if we’re keeping track, after spending a whole three years on this river, I thought I would be able to explain my relationship with grief, the clarity it provides, and its gifts. The clearing in the forest where the sacred, surrender, and sacrifice are celebrated like witches prostrate under a full moon. The howl you can draw from your torso when you release what rages in there, the freedom of mortality, the precious and pure love that still stands when everything else burns to the ground.

I’m not sure if I’ve erected a monument to all things I thought I would have accomplished by now if life hadn’t life’d so hard. If it hadn’t swept us into another current, missing the confluence of streams and carrying us over into our very own body of water. But I know that to do my banking this way, counting all that hasn’t happened against all that has, won’t balance my account, and yet, it seems worth reviewing. Worth picking up each river-worn stone and feeling its smooth surface in the palm of my hand. Feeling all that time and water passing over, all that had to happen to make their edges soft, to reveal stripes of color hidden in its depths.