“Mother, I am exhausted.”
An unmarked envelope slipped under your door contains your favourite pencil from when you were thirteen. There is an ache of seventeen.
In the back of the car with your parents. In your childhood friend’s home.
In school corridors you have walked a thousand times.
In the shortcut from home to school. In your last assignment.
In packing your life into suitcases.
In a space with people you grew up and apart with.
This will not come again. Return.
Return to the fleeting moments
that must be gripped tightly for the fear of losing them.
And, you…
You return to the kitchen floor. At the edge of childhood.
Please, take my hand. Please, don’t let it go.
What is childhood like?
It’s a little like dying, a little like being born.
Which is to say, it’s nothing you can remember,
but you know there was blood.
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child.
I felt like a person all along — the same person I am today.
The trees you planted in your childhood have grown too heavy.
You cannot bring them along.
Give yourself to the air, to what you cannot hold.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Sonnets to Orpheus”
