From My Hands, She Takes Flight

I picked up Big A from gymnastics last night and was talking on the phone while she walked out of the building. I looked at her once, and it actually took a few seconds for it to register, "That's Big A".

My heart lurched and fluttered and then resumed it's usual rhythm, yet one more moment in my life where a sudden recognition of something that has clearly been in front of me all along startles me into today, now, this minute. Because I feel like most of the time, maybe, I'm living in yesteryear.

When I think, "Big A" , the image of her that appears in my mind's eye is one of her at age four or five, grinning, wide eyed, a tooth missing, blue eyes actually laughing. I can hear the laughter, the memory is so distinct. She is obviously not that person now. Instead she stands before me, all limbs and length and her smile is slower, more thoughtful; it isn't a gift that she gives freely and openly, it must be earned and deserved.

She doesn't possess the open and trusting heart that I'd hoped to give her, and I wonder if that fault is mine. I assure myself that no, she was always serious and quiet, and that the memory of that moment with her is actually an anomaly; which is perhaps why it is so dear to me, which is perhaps why I have chosen that memory as the one that sparks her image within me--to assuage my own guilt and worries about what it is that I am passing along to those that matter most to me.

I remember holding her hands as she grew, taking mental pictures of how they looked within my own. I remember each day, kissing her sweet baby rolls, then becoming frightened with the knowledge that so few remained. The first thing I would do in the morning when I awoke was to check the spot where her arm met her hand; it was the last fat that remained. I have countless pictures devoted to that spot, how it bunched up. I recall thinking that if I checked each day, it couldn't disappear, and yet, it did. The last physical remnant of the baby that was, one morning, no longer there. I spent that day crying periodically; akin to when you lose someone you love--when you try to remember their voice, their smell, their touch and then worry that, already, with them, those things are gone; were they ever once even real?

It's not only her that I do this with; in my mind's eye, my eldest nephew remains eight or nine, although he now drives a car, his siblings at least three years behind their actual ages, my thoughts always having to process why my sister is speaking of buying them school clothes and packing lunches because that's not where they have settled in the nooks of my memories.

My grandparents, although grandparents, remain at least a decade younger, my aunt, uncles, friends; all still existing in the planes of youth and pre-stretch marks and mortgages and husbands that don't come home.

But mostly, it's Big A that continues to remind me of time pressing forward and makes me face what simultaneously I dread and dream: that she will soon be soaring on her own, her visions of me perhaps skewed, her thoughts somewhere between a memory and mystery: did she hold me like that, did she kiss me there, did she always throw her head back when she laughed?

I just want to know, to be assured, to rest easy in the knowledge that as she's taking flight she has memorized within her heart the hands that that released her and is always confident that they were as such, and will always remain, exactly what she needs them to be.