Pleased to Make Your Acquaintance

It is strange that it is your choices that have allowed me the great privilege of being here, and yet our paths did not cross, not even in the tiny blip of my infancy. It is so strange that you raised young children, presumably as lost and with as much uncertainty as I am. My life is an echo of yours, a reverberation of all the small choices that led you to one another and further led you to pursue children despite scary pregnancies and miscarriages and trauma that must have cut you to the quick. And yet I have only come to know you in the fond recollections of my dearest aunt, the rest veiled by the silence of my father and assumptions I have made based on the mystery of that vacuum.

I feel the echoes of your feet here as I meander through the stages of life; I often wonder if you would be proud? If you met our kids, would you be as smitten with them as I am? Knowing how hard you had to work to merely to survive, what would my easy, travel-filled, latte-enriched lifestyle look like to you?

My first nephew recently came into the world and I was awestruck at the instantaneous connection I felt to him. ‘Here he is!’ my soul exclaimed as I looked into a still photograph of his first few hours of life. I was so simultaneously proud of my sister-in-law and brother and so aghast that I could love anyone I hadn’t met with such ferocity. It is, I suppose, a love that is similar to how I feel about the ghosts of those who have come before me. When I think of the long arms of history that connect me to the past, there is an intrinsic connection to the earth, a visceral tether that reaches through time and space and connects all the energy that ever was to all the energy that ever will be and it is in this place that I find myself most deeply rooted to you.

I often wonder at the obscure connections we find to those who should be merely strangers, but bypass all nicety and politeness to get to the real marrow of things. A friend met in a hotel room in a rural city foreign to both of us who proved to know me perhaps better than I know myself. An aunt who feels like my oldest and dearest confidante despite decades between our arrival. A partner who seems to understand my very essence on an instinctual level, dissecting my emotions and needs without the need for words. A sister I found in a dorm room, seemingly utterly by chance.

I find myself deeply connected to you, too, despite never having made your acquaintance. I wonder where your nose is in my face, if you shared my strong thighs and wide hips, if you felt yourself soar when sprinting and loved the buoyancy of submersion. Did you close your eyes, tears streaming down your face, when a lone cello reverberated from the stage? Did you find friends in novels and your heart perpetually wandering toward home, home, home?

I wonder if you pursued travel and change and new experiences and if you looked at the world with awe and terror simultaneously as I often do. I wonder how World War II altered you and if at night you ever prayed to those who came before you in a kind of hypnotic chant, a lonely, stumbling wish that in all the darkness and emptiness there is some small, overarching meaning?

I watch my children play and their expressions and I wonder where you are in them. I listen with a dreamy romance as my aunt talks about you and I wonder about all the ways you are expressed in myself and in my children and just thinking about our connection makes the world seem much less enormous and fearsome. And now that we have children of our own, I wonder how I will be remembered. I wonder what stories will be told about Tim and I and the footsteps we took here. And I wonder if the little ones to come will have my nose or my eyes or my raucous and uncontrollable laughter. I think back and I think forward and I realize how infinitesimal my time is here and this realization makes every moment so unendingly precious.

These moments are all so fleeting. I am so fleeting. And my time with my dearest ones is slipping through my fingertips. And soon, I will join you. Wherever you are. And, if you are anything like me, it will be such a joyous and ridiculous reunion and there will be no pretense and it shall be like no time at all has passed during our separation. Until that moment, I shall chant small nothings to you in the deepest, darkest hours of the night in the hopes that you are listening. That somewhere across the impenetrable void, you are hearing the pleas I only give voice in the peak of the dark. And that in the chaos of any given moment, I am not alone. And, in fact, none of us ever shall be.