The journey was long but the ice-cream and flavoured water
kept her going. At times, her head hurt and she thought she might collapse in a
heap onto the carpeted floor, but she didn’t. She maintained focus and sipped
the berry-scented liquid and wondered if arrival was eminent.
She cried when they arrived, she cried tears of happy and
sad and aching feeling. When she saw the bearded visage of her uncle she cried
and he was crying too. It made her heart hurt, this happiness/sadness feeling.
The children were so much bigger and taller and blonder and even more
beautiful. They were almost strangers, but they were also so familiar.
They drove down familiar highways and past townships that
reminded her of the past. She felt shocked and horrified by this reality: she
had forgotten or perhaps blocked out, the devestation hidden in this city. She
wasn’t sure if she wanted to be reminded.
And then the streets, she knew their names and she knew the
directions and there was where her old friend Hillary had lived and there was
her favourite chip shop. And all of a sudden they were at that familiar house
and she braced herself for the wave of feelings that she knew would wash over
her like a wild wave: feelings of regret and happiness and intense sadness and raw
emotions. When she saw her grandparents looking so much older and smaller, what
could she do what could she say? And when she saw her favourite aunt and her
other cousins, who had grown handsome in her absence. Her gentle beautiful
family surrounded her like warmth and she felt her heart burst of too much
happiness and too much sadness, all at once.
And then too quickly far too quickly she had to leave
because it was time. It was so much worse, the farewell, because it seemed
final and she was an adult now and had adult emotions and understood how things
work and understood that life is not as infinite as you might always imagine. The
very shortness of life scared her and that fear came in bursts that knocked the
air out of her lungs and made tears spring to her eyes. This same fear made her
anxious about achievement and existence and existential matters. This same fear
made her sick to the stomach about going home and leaving these wonderous
people behind. She wished that she could stay but she knew that she could not
and would not either, it was an impossible desire and an impossible thing.
She never used to understand why people owned paper
shredders and why they were even invented, but now she did. She understood now
that people had no time to shred paper into teeny-tiny pieces, life and time
was too important. She wondered who had created the idea or the concept of
time, and if they had come to hate themselves for it. Time passing made her
anxious, maybe if the concept of time did not exist she would exist more
freely, without any grasp of it passing or of her limited duration.
