“Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.”

I’ve been scrabbling for words lately, trying to find the head space between being stupid busy at work and mood swinging in my head.

I’m full of thoughts-almost to bursting. To the point where I can peel through them. I feel like an onion with layers, some moldy and rotten, some remaining sweet and fragrant. But an unstable onion, unable to point and shoot in the right direction, my sulfuric acid going to waste.

This is my irritable time-when the words don’t work, and I’m not full of flowering phrases or beautiful odes to those I love, to the moments in time I’ve stopped for. I feel deconstructed, Northrup Fryed. My metaphors are jumbled and distilled.

It’s the most awkward thing-being capable of such moving grace in words one day, and the next being almost incapable of stringing a sentence together. I know my work is sometimes lovely, but it is fickle, and removable.

I’m full, and yet at the same time, vastly empty.

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I took Rosalyn to the mall the other day, and we browsed in the dollar store. In one aisle were a stack of clocks.

“Want the clocks!” she yelled, “WANT CLOCK!” Except she left the L out of the word each time, and I felt the surrealness of life with a toddler descend upon me. Thankfully, no one seemed to hear.

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Watching my daughters makes my hands shake to write, to try and capture that essence, the sloth like speed of time, the blindness we hold towards tomorrow. I have suddenly become so very cognizant of time, of how soon they will be 16 and ignoring their weird mother, how soon I will rarely touch them again. Time is going to betray me, and make women out of my daughters.

Again, I tell myself “No Pre-Mourning.”

I am but a vessel for them, my words an extension of their arms. I write for them, so the late afternoon September sun will remain fixed in their eyes, orange and peering through changing leaves, the soft diffusion that makes me wish for a camera. Their brown eyes trust implicitly, and follow me, casting about for their beauty. The sky holds wonders, turtles and magicians, rocket ships, the moon.

How we ache for the moon.

Already Vivian stretches up to touch the sky “What will it feel like?” she asks. “Tell me when you touch it.” I reply. She might go there some day, into the sky. “Will it feel like cotton candy?” I ask.

“No!” she giggles.

The blue is blue on blue on forever, and her eyes shine because of it.