Pick-Up Portal

I park outside of the girls preschool and have eight minutes until it’s time to sign them out. This moment always becomes a portal. A time travel of sadness - some sort of millennial 2011 scratch that I need to itch, a song I need to hear. This day it was the Drive soundtrack. I turn the volume up a bit too high. Dark, synthy beats that were already nostalgic for another time. Like a cycle of yearning that never ends. For a time that felt more intact, a time when we knew less. A time when our hearts were less full of cracks. There was a life to be lived, grass to be trampled through, fresh air to be gulped, lakes to dive into.

Now I sit in my messy-mom car, listening to this 2011 baby-faced Ryan Gosling-movie soundtrack that had all of us in a Pitchfork tailspin, counting the minutes until 2:59. I try not to catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window - smile lines creasing a bit deeper these days, skin tone dulling, one month until forty quickly creeping. A husband who left for some sort of sexual soliloquy. A husband who left me. In the dark. Without a story to hold on to. Without any bearings. Without a compass, a vane, a map, a flashlight, a road, a roof.

This is where the thoughts always collect, like leaves getting caught on top of a drain. A moment of aloneness that becomes a quick doorway to nostalgia, to the air feeling like I’m 17 on a summer’s day with the windows down. And then a whopping moment of sadness thudding right behind. Engulfing this brief gasp of hope, of youth, I don’t know what it is. A lightning bug of an old life that I keep trying to catch, that keeps escaping my grasp.