Everything That Rises

Four years. Most people finish college in four years (I did it in three and a half, but who’s counting?). A lot of folks pay off car loans in four years. Four Years. How can such a span of time feel so incredibly short and long at the same time? I can remember being scared to death standing in that little apartment-turned-office in Kunming, my rising anxiety made all the more real by the dozen or so other people in that place making copies, signing papers, shuffling through bags to find passports and other documents. The only thing that kept me from going crazy was the same thing that always keeps me from going crazy, your mom. She knew what forms they needed to see, where I needed to sign. There was this flurry of paperwork it seemed, then, all of the sudden, without confetti, without the celebratory pomp and circumstance such an event demands, you came strolling in the room, holding the hand of a woman’s whose name I either never knew or have long-since forg

*This is the only "studio" picture I can ever remember seeing of my Grandma.  I can’t really remember the last time I felt that way, but it was a feeling that snuck up on me this afternoon. Quietly, briefly, like a whisper in a crowded room from a familiar voice you thought was long dead. It wasn’t anything particularly notable. I was just lying on the couch, under a light blanket, under the ceiling fan, the blinds open with the afternoon sun struggling to break through the summer thundershower threatening to wet the hot concrete on the driveway. I don’t know what triggered it. Maybe it was the temperature, the particular way the couch pushed back against me, the right amount of sunlight, the time of day…but it hit me, that feeling I haven’t felt in so long, a feeling that seemed to belong to another person, in another time. There’s no real word for it. I’m not even sure if I can say it’s a universal feeling, but as I was lying on that couch I was suddenly, p