/lit/ - Literature

PART 1/2

Setting: I sit at the island in my kitchen. The sun is just dipping below the trees that surround my home. Orange light casts across the quartz surface that supports my laptop. The whiskey bottle beside me is alight with hues of orange, but longing for more continents. Cool air laps at my feet as is pours in from the open kitchen windows. My wife is giving our son a bath upstairs. I can hear his laughs over the music that plays in my ears.

This should be a beautiful fall evening. A view and atmosphere that should evoke such joy in me. But it feels like I’m looking at a candle that was in closet storage. It’s wick cool and a wick that has lost a desire to dance with the flame of yesterday. I feel like I am slowly sinking into depression. Which is ironic given my occupation. Therapist. I spend all day fixing the problems of other’s. Helping them navigate their ship in a direction that brings them joy. Yet, I sit in my home, listening to my son practice his ‘ABC’s’ with the woman of my dreams. And all I can think about its, time. Or lack of it’s actual existence. Time is a construct. Nothing more and certainly nothing less. We all are given so little of it. It slips between my hands everyday. Just last month I was on vacation. I took a picture of the day we arrived. No specific commemoration, just they day we arrived at the condo. I look at that picture everyday since. Each day feels like it is accelerating the time from that even to the present. Memories in my life flutter down like snow. I remember trying to get my wife pregnant. The pain we felt when we had to undergo treatment. The nights holding onto the idea of a child. Now he is here. He talks and walks. He thins out leaving his chunky infant body behind. He defies, challenges, assures. He. Is. Life. Brooding, giggling, loving, anger, sadness, tears. All of it. I made it. It is me. It is her. It is all of time. Peaking at a point it what we consider a linear movement through space. But it isn’t really. I’m not here. You, reading these pathetic words, don’t exist. We say we do, but we aren’t really here. Just give it some. Time. T-I-M-E. Something we created. Something we agree exists, is our own downfall. It erases who we are. Everything. I’ll be dead a lot longer than I could ever hope to be alive. So, is this pain worth it? The pain of going in everyday and helping others achieve more. Hearing my son laugh today, knowing in a flash of neuron fires, he will hate me as a teenager, then move out, and die himself.