I spent the last three days of 2024 on the hours-long stretch of highway between my hometown and my grandpa’s house and sitting by him in the hospital where my grandma died two springs ago. I spent many hours slumped over in a chair, staring at a beige wall. I watched farmland and mountains blur by me. I listened exclusively to Preacher’s Daughter.
I am good in hospitals. For some reason they are the one place I can sit still. Maybe because the chaos they hold demands it, or maybe because I have spent too much time inside of them and have practiced being calm amidst the unknowable horrors. Nonetheless I think I am exactly the person you want in a hospital. I know what questions we should ask the doctor, trained by my ex nurse grandma. I can live off of vending machine snacks and soda. I make conversation with the nurses. I know how to work the TV’s. I hold your hand, even when you aren’t conscious of it or if it is ice cold. And most important of all, I can sit in waiting rooms for hours.
The waiting room is exactly where I spent most of the second to last day of the year. St. Joseph’s hospital in Lewiston, ID is the largest full-service medical center between Boise, Idaho and Spokane, Washington. Both my dad’s parents, my dad, his brother and sister, three of my cousins and my older sibling were born there.
My sibling and I got lost in the hallways trying to find my grandpa after going outside for a few minutes while the nurses got him situated in his, almost comically, small room. I jokingly asked them why they didn’t remember the layout from when they were a baby, and they replied only by saying, “You’ve been here before, too.” For the hundredth time that day I remembered this is where I saw her for the last time. I almost collapsed onto the floor.
As you drift further from someone in time, they feel less and less real. Rather than being characters in your everyday life, they are characters of your memory. When I was a kid I heard on NPR that the more you think about a memory, the less like reality it becomes. When memories and people live only in your head, they turn into warped versions of themselves that will eventually become hardly recognizable.
Maybe this is why I am so obsessed with journaling and writing. I think if I do a good enough job at conjuring the words necessary to describe a moment, and how it felt, then it will be safe from the warp. I know deep down this isn’t true. Not everything can be captured in a narrative. Words cannot make things real again. They will never bring someone back into the present. As time passes memories start to exist in context, and so in turn it will always warp them.
At my grandma’s memorial I told a story about making rice crispy treats with her for her friend Sunday when I was three or four or maybe five. That was the entire story. Later, in therapy, I mocked myself for speaking about such a trivial moment at her memorial. Now I know what I was actually trying to say by sharing this memory: I lived a million seemingly meaningless moments with this person. They matter to me. Time has taken them far away from me but it can never take away the fact that we once lived alongside one another.
I had been planning this trip to Idaho before my grandpa went into the hospital. I wanted to visit my dads hometown, just fifteen minutes south of where my grandpa lives now, and write a piece about the death of childhood. I thought if I saw the streets where my dad grew up playing, I would be able to say something beautiful about it being over. Instead, visiting reminded me of the gritty reality of adulthood. The rug will be ripped out from underneath you over and over again and the only person who can pick you up is yourself. The only person who can put things back in order is you.
Despite childhood officially being over for a few years now, it is only since I started my job at an elementary school in September that I really reckoned with this reality. I watched kids on the playground and thought about how they will never be that young again. Working there has presented me with the indisputable reality that I am no longer eight years old. There is no one to blame but myself for my unhappiness. I am the only one responsible for changing my life so that it is one I want to live.
If 2024 was the year of anything it was the year of change. Almost nothing I do in my daily life mirrors that of a year ago. I rarely drive a car. I don’t listen to Liability by Lorde everyday. I am not enrolled in school. I do not see my parents everyday. I hardly ever cry. Ginger and I don’t lay together in my bed in the morning. I am, for the most part, not actively suicidal.
I ride the bus to and from a job I love five days a week. I sleep in a house that isn’t my parents. I take long walks with no destination in particular. I look both ways when I cross the street. I smile at the sky in its various forms: blue, pink, grey, orange, purple or anything in between. I have started to pray, even though I’m not sure I believe in god. I see my friends on most days. My feet hurt. I think my life may be worthwhile after all.
I’ve been wondering if time has always felt this fast, if the years have always disappeared between my fingers like grains of sand. I have been watching as weeks pass by and pile up behind me before I can comprehend what is happening. My life feels like a snowball rolling down a mountain. I’m learning that this is the nature of time. It moves on quickly, and without permission. It takes things that once meant the world to you and drags you forward without them. Time warps and changes everything, irreparably. It’s over and done with. It’s never coming back.
Beautiful keys love you