Everyone needs a place where time can’t find you, where the landscape swallows time the way the water gulps up the shoreline every second of the day. This corner of the world is detached from time, wholly present, endlessly still, yet always in motion. The water sees to that.
It’s good to disappear sometimes.
When you’re a sojourner, you miss milestones. You miss friends’ graduation open houses, you miss engagement parties, you miss their weddings. You see the highlights, but you miss all the late nights. You miss the unsung moments that expand gloriously to fill the spaces between each infrequent occasion we mark with a long distance text, or an even less-frequent card.
And then, as time passes, you start missing something else, too.
You miss the funerals.
Your friend dies, and you can’t be there for the funeral.
Your friend’s mother dies, and you can’t be there for the funeral.
Your friend’s baby dies, and you can’t be there for the funeral.
It is not true that distance makes the heart grow fonder. Distance actually makes the heart swell with grief, makes ones whole being ache deeply, wearily, at the realization that
you
can’t
be
there.
Distance means you can’t be there
to silently hold,
to cry alongside,
to weep together.
They tell you nothing is the best thing to say in the face of grief.
They don’t tell you how impossible it is to fill a blank card with mutual tears, fold it into a stiff envelope, and drop it down down down into the unknown darkness, where it will sail away, carried by unsuspecting hands, and finally land in a faraway box, alone and a bit worn around the edges.
They tell you just to be there.
And that’s the one thing you can’t do, when you’re a sojourner.
Aveline watched Fiddler on the Roof this weekend for the first time. I think she’s discovered a new love, musicals (are any of us really that surprised?) This afternoon, we listened to the soundtrack at her request, and she burst into tears listening to “Far from the Home I Love”.
“Dat girl, she was singing she wanted to go to da home she loved and she got on da train instead!”
She gets it, this kid. She feels the pull that tugs hearts in many directions. Only three years old and already so many trips to our various homes to be with the people we love, and always leaving, to go back to Florida again.
Another little sojourner. <3
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