#if theres ever a time machine
I was cleaning out the linen closet last week, looking for something, and I came across an old tin of buttons. Its faded, gold-and-black patterned paint is peeling off and the tin itself is rusting in places. It’s ancient - dating back to as long as I can remember. A childhood spent in another world, on the other side of the ocean. I opened the tin and took a deep inhale. Smell is so primal, so exquisite in its ability to transport us back in time. And there I was, over thirty years in the past.
She’s in the kitchen, and she’s making us lunch. She’s got something cooking in the frying pan. I’m outside, playing in the garden, in my own make-believe world. There is comfort here; safety, and warmth, and love. Summer days that stretch endlessly into the horizon and I am so certain that I am safe, that I do not pause even for a moment to contemplate it ever coming to an end.
There are no endings in my world, only bright, hopeful mornings and lazy afternoons and cozy twilights spent listening to French music on the enormous old Russian-model radio and getting lost in a book of fairy tales.
She’s sitting at her sewing table and I can hear the clack-clack, clack-clack of the old pedal going, going. I shuffle closer to her, and I can smell the fabric she’s working with. She’s wearing her old house coat, has her big glasses on and on her left arm she has that old pin cushion bracelet with the blue fabric. She’s sewing carefully, but she pauses to see what I’m doing, peering at me over her glasses, her eyes alive with that sparkle she always had.
I’m so deliriously, stupidly happy. So content, in this moment. I wish I could stay there forever, in this memory. flooded with love, with joy, with the innocence of being four years old and endlessly, beautifully safe.
If they ever invent a time machine, this is where I’m going. No hesitation. I’m rushing decades into the past and holding on to it with everything I’ve got, for as long as I’m allowed to. I was never ready to leave. I never am. Time rushes forward and drags me along with it, battered and bruised. I was never ready, and I’m still not – the words, “Wait a minute..” always poised on my lips, in the end.
