On Opening Time Capsules

Can fingers grow rusty?

It’s been 6 years, almost to the day of my last musing on this site, and if I’m being honest, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here. I imagine this feels similar to returning to your childhood home after your family sold it years prior. You walk up the newly carpeted stairs and forget to move slightly to the right to avoid the creak on that one step. Or like finding a well-loved sweater you assumed you donated long ago. It still smells like you, but you could have sworn the colors were a slightly different hue and it wasn’t this tight.

Maybe it’s not my fingers…can words grow rusty?

As I read back through my own words on this site, I’m moved to tears. Am I allowed to say that? Whatever. It is true. I love that girl. I love her heart, her willful optimism, the way she sees the world and the local church, and her deep love of Christ. I love her youth and desire to do well by others. Gosh, I love that she opened that black security cage on her front door countless times to invite neighborhood children in to color with chalk on her floors. I love that she had chickens and drove against traffic to the farmer’s markets. She wanted a life full of color; and when she took time to be present, she saw the different hues of life, loved them and wrote them down.

Perhaps this is why people buy rose-colored glasses and bury time capsules — for momentary nostalgia.

But do they get the aftertaste of grief, too? Or is that just me?

I love her, and yet, I grieve that she and I are no longer in that season of our lives. I grieve her absence. I grieve her moxie. I know, or at least believe her to be within my soul still. To me, life stages have always felt like the Fisher Price Ring Stack toy, each one building upon the last. I believe some people call that “growth.” And yet if I am being honest, I feel I’ve grown up…up, and away from her. I know her, and yet, I’m not known by her. There’s no morality assigned to that statement, just a vulnerable truth of time.

She hasn’t formed these lines on my forehead or around my eyes.

She hasn’t grieved what we’ve grieved. She hasn’t quarantined. She hasn’t watched the death count multiply on the nightly news. She can still talk to Pop-Pop, Nana, Barbara, Amanda, and Edith. She hasn’t experienced the collective anxiety and helplessness that accompany horrendous violence in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. She hasn’t heard the name Breonna Taylor or George Floyd. She hasn’t heard him cry for his mom. She only knows January 6th as the day we celebrate Epiphany and DOGE as a meme. She doesn’t have a neurologist and therapist. (Though she does have a dermatologist, atta girl!) She doesn’t need white noise and a pill and a prayer and a meditation to fall asleep. She hasn’t feared for the future and cried out for God’s intercession. Not like you and I have.

Similarly, she hasn’t loved what I’ve loved. She hasn’t watched in awe as her friends become mamas. She hasn’t held their babies, now toddlers. She has never heard of The Eras Tour or cared about the Chiefs. She hasn’t celebrated these anniversaries or danced at these weddings. She’s never met this fuzzy ball of chaotic energy we call JoJo. She’s never arranged these flowers or seen these sunsets. She has no idea how much her 30s feel like home. She hasn’t ridden in a driverless car. She hasn’t tasted lobster in Maine or eaten the absolute best Italian food in Chicago. Not yet, anyway.

She had a desire to get our hands, our hearts, and our minds around how our life was unraveling before us. But the intensity of these last 6 years was more than she knew how to process in real-time. Life was no longer being unraveled like a ball of string before her, rather it was being unraveled like a tapestry, out of control, too much, too fast. Our hands, our hearts, and our minds were full of strings, threads that once tied up our ideals, our understandings, our faith, our security. As she was becoming me, we stopped writing.

I think I need to reconcile with her, show her the scars and hard earned smile, before I begin to write about our life again. To show her there is beauty and hope and good in this world still, just maybe not in the sweetest frames in which we used to trust.

By reconnecting with her, I’m learning now what she knew then: it’s better to confront life with open hands.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve returned to this website, to these musings, and to write with open hands once more.

Perhaps it is because I feel this season’s winds shifting on a precipice of change, and I want to capture this version of me before I become her.