Where does the time go

With every sip the sadden deepens. Inarticulate. Just a vague sadness.
“If I can’t have love, I want power.” New Halsey album drops.
Renaissance Madonna cover. Virgo season mood.
Tyler pointed out once that so many artists are Virgos. Beyoncé.
Hayley’s a Virgo. They give the best advice. Always ten-steps ahead waiting for us to catch up. To their detriment. While we lag behind we make unpredictable moves. They have to refresh the homescreen. Sankofa. Having to go back.
Inarticulate longing.
In the mornings, in France, I’d drink my coffee with Peeter even though he was thousands of miles away. It was a visceral connection. The sea stones he had plucked from the Baltic shore in my hand, cool and smooth. Uks, kaks, kolm, neli, viis. Correct me if I’m wrong. He told me I read in Estonian well despite not knowing what I was reading. The phonetic guides, the umlauts, especially in the word for Night, öö. The sounds an owl makes, as if the owl were maker of names for it’s nocturnal hunting time.
This morning I have coffee with no one. The sadness deepens.
Megan sends me a quip from a mutual friend’s instagram:
“sometimes it feels like Globemallow is smiling in a way I used to know how to,” it said.
Reason aligned.
Virgo season.

“There’s no photos of me smiling,” Mom says, scrolling through the photos of my brother’s wedding on her phone.
“Did you find the ones of you dancing?” I asked. She hadn’t.
“Keep scrolling.”

I find a photo of me smiling.
I’m next to my brother, clutching onto his arm.
My sister is on the other side of him.

My mom finds the photos of her dancing. She’s dancing with her son.
She’s smiling.
It’s the moment that made my brother break down alone in Mexico maybe a week later. Seeing her happy, or having connection sink in.
So much actual emotion happens in the memory, later, not in the moment.
Sometime unexpected, when the memory moves through sleeps and becomes distilled.
The weight doesn't exist in the wash of the present.

Sometimes it takes years.

In my memory, my mother is smiling and dancing with my brother and everyone has moved off to the side and is cheering.
They are dancing to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
They have a loose choreography. My mom was nervous about forgetting it so we practiced it over and over beforehand. I told her it was mostly improvisational, these kinds of things, so not to worry.

“You’re a dancer anyway,” I had said, “this kind of thing will come natural for you.”
“I was never good at choreography,” she had responded, memorizing the moves. It’s why she dropped out of dance school. Too stressful.

It was really special, watching them dance. It’s what Mom always longs for.
To dance with her grown children on a special day. It doesn’t happen often, these kinds of things.

Virgo season.
I’m dotting the edges of cotton handkerchiefs with a kind of seam adhesive and hanging them outside with clothespins. The cotton waves like ghosts, the sun becoming a little more slanted everyday, harsher on the southern horizon.

The vague nostalgia deepens.

I laid in bed this morning watching tiktok videos of people using this filter that makes a child version of themselves meld into a present day version of themselves. It went along to “Where’d all the time go?” Everyone had different reactions. For some it seemed validating. For others it seemed as if they were reacting to the bridged time in-between, a culmination of pain, experience that had accumulated into a hard-won wisdom.
When they’d cover their mouth, “reacting,” the filter of reddened lips superimposed over their hands.
It was real, it wasn’t real. It was whatever.
I scrolled through them for maybe twenty minutes.

“I wouldn’t react like that,” I thought of the ones that looked full of regret or pain.
The ones where they’d cry, making that off selfie non-eye-contact with the person on the screen.

In hanging the cotton material out to dry there’s a sense of satisfaction roped in with doing something old-fashioned and wholesome. Hanging the linens out to dry after beating them in the washtub with the rendered bar of fat.

What we call simpler times. Times when we didn’t experience the simulated and repeated human experience of watching the time pass through someone’s existence on a media platform?

Last night I bought her book, and life now is just waiting for it to come in the mail.
Then it will be slowly processing it through winter.
Then it will be reflecting on it for the time after.

The Holy Yonder.

I told her about eudaemonia and the zine I’m writing or not writing about words. About the connection with the muse, all of our connections with that entity that exists alongside us that isn’t exactly us, doing the work.

A daemon, a genius.

Now is just waiting.