Learn From It

At home, in one's own bed and bedroom, there are those few waking moments when the world is as it always was. A dependable cadence of days imbues balance and security and constancy to life, so much more than the boring rigor most describe.

The body awakes before the head; the eyes open before the mind opens up and shares its marvelous memory: the gift and the curse.

Those moments can vary from mere flashes up to many seconds, where he's still here and the bed is not empty just because I've left it, where all those horrible, horrible things never happened and life is still companionable and the days along which I trundle are not borrowed from anywhere but his heart, his love. My heart, my love.

Half the house it used to be, and none of the Home. Splendor is a luxury unattainable.

The universe is inverted, tilted, half-empty. Which is the same thing as absolutely not full.

Alone is something comforting in the way that Givens are; it's the way that one arrives and leaves this world. Lonely is quite another: the world has left you.

•••

Baby, where's that place where time stands still?

I remember like a lover can,

I forget it like a leaver will.

It's no place you can get to by yourself:

You've got to love someone and they love you,

Time will stop for nothing else.



And memory plays tricks on us, the more we cling, the less we trust,

And the less we trust the more we hurt,

And as time goes on it just gets worse.

So, baby, where's that place where time stood still?

It is under glass inside a frame?

Was it over when you had your fill?


Here we are with nothing,

But this emptiness inside of us.

Your smile a fitting, final gesture:

Wish I could have loved you better.


Baby where's that place where time stands still?

I remember like a lover can.

I forget it like a leaver will.

It's the first time that you held my hand;

It's the smell and the taste and the fear and the thrill.

It's everything I understand,

And all the things I never will.

— Where Time Stands Still, Words & music by Mary Chapin Carpenter