Beyond the awakening is the fragility to which i am most attuned;
Because hasn’t spring brought both love & heartache, conception & loss, burials and re-births?
How do I explain what it is to see a parent outside the highschool, pacing back and forth on her cellphone. Or another, a father, walking briskly toward the building with cleats in his arms. Or my own cheek still charged with the bristle of my son’s as he kissed me goodbye and hopped out of the driver’s seat… the car emptied of his breakfast, his music, his overbearing book bag.
I remain still. Bound to the passenger side of this empty vehicle.
Waiting? Watching? What?
The speed of time?
How suddenly the landscape becomes lush?
No matter how inconvenienced we are. These children. These lives. Ready to fly. Are everything.
Even as we let them go. Little by little. And then all at once. Holding on to the simplest ways to say:
We are.
We were once.
One.
The Empty Nest Diary 