The quiet settles through the apartment.
She presses her ear to his door, and waits for his wild imagination — listens for the final chuga chuga choo choos as the last steam train passes through his consciousness.
She hopes for its absence; the surest sign he has finally drifted into nap time.
She revels in the silence and the calm, yet even the quiet cannot give her her thoughts back as they ping pong around all the half-done things, the could-have should-have things…
The light streaming in from the balcony pulls her over.
She carefully dances through the minefield of toys scattered across the floor, to let the last rays sink into her skin before the sun disappears behind the building.
Her gaze falls 28 stories upon the construction below — workers like ants scramble this way and that and she imagines the scene like a time-lapse;
Cranes swinging back & fourth
as the sun rises and sets in seconds,
tiny rapid movements of workers and
concrete and metal heaving
become a grand upleveling —
a magnificent rising.
Yet from above, the rising still appears 2 dimensional, as if nothing has grown — no movement upwards, just a swinging back and fourth through the days, heaving obstacles to get through have-toos in an endless scene of sameness.
But really nothing is the same in sameness. She knows this deeply as she feels it in pangs of loss — her baby is growing everyday and she can’t catch up — and so she scribbles his phrases down in corners of to do lists and grocery lists, and lists of yielded dreams, things she longing to get back to…
Until — she finds herself present enough to catch that very moment of change — when he has pieced together a 3.5 year old thought that a 3.2 year old just couldn’t find yet, couldn’t get out.
That’s when she realizes she’s the only one on earth who’s witnessed that bloom opening.
Felt the earth shifting as her wild child discovers something new — his world expanding, and she realizes, that hers too is not closing in, in smallness and sameness, but opening to the grandest most spectacular vistas.