A Monday in June, Somewhere Between Him and Now

 

Lately, I’ve been collecting things.

 

Not objects. Moments.

 

A sentence overheard in a grocery store. A memory that surfaced while folding laundry. The particular color of the sky on an otherwise forgettable Monday.

I mean the fragments. 

The thoughts that arrive while brushing my teeth. The rebuttals  that surface years too late. The sentences I write down at red lights. The questions that never find an answer. The versions of myself I no longer recognize, and the ones I still catch looking back at me.

 

This feels like a place for those things.

 

A collection of passing observations, unfinished thoughts, poems scribbled in the margins, and the occasional storm cloud that follows me home. Some entries may be beautiful. Some may be embarrassing. Most will probably be somewhere in between.

 

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much of a life is spent becoming. We are always arriving somewhere just as we’re leaving something else behind. A different city. A different relationship. A different dream. A different version of ourselves. Sometimes I wish I could gather every discarded piece and place them neatly on a shelf, just to see who they once belonged to.

 

There are entire seasons of my life I can only access through feeling. A song. A scent. The particular shade of evening light through a window. I forget dates. I forget details. But I remember how things felt. The weight of waiting. The ache of wanting. The strange quiet that follows a goodbye. The relief of discovering that what broke you did not, in fact, destroy you.

 

Maybe that’s what this is really about.

 

Not documenting events, but preserving atmospheres.

 

The emotional weather of a life.

 

The storms that looked permanent until they weren’t. The people who felt like home until they didn’t. The ordinary afternoons that revealed themselves years later to be sacred. The moments I rushed through that now glow at the edges of memory.

 

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to understand things while they were happening. Trying to find the lesson before the chapter was over. Lately, I’m less interested in answers. I’m more interested in noticing. Paying attention. Sitting with uncertainty long enough to hear what it has to say.

 

Maybe this is my attempt.

 

Not to make sense of everything, but to keep a record of it. To leave breadcrumbs for the person I become next. To remember what it felt like to stand exactly here, in this body, in this season, carrying these particular hopes and heartbreaks.

 

A place for the things that would otherwise disappear.

 

If nothing else, let this be proof that I was paying attention.