The layers of our reality simmer. One jelly and warm, settling in from a recent embrace from a loved one. One dry and flaking. Overcooked. Still struggling to stay together. One grasping the earth. In perpetual silence. Reclusive and alone, heavy with the weight of all the layers on top of it, but comforted by them like a weighted blanket. Yet another stiff and cold, protective, hiding the many layers within, aware of its fragility despite holding up well to the outside gaze. It is perhaps the weakest layer of all.
We are all our layers, though some may forget to tend to one or avoid another as it’s complicated to keep them all together day in and day out. And some are a bit simpler too–perfectly designed by the local chain bakery for a child’s birthday, while others opera cake with hundreds of thin layers carefully pressed together only to quickly come apart.
As the knife of aging and climate change and global pandemics and unfulfilled dreams and loss of loved ones and loving ones presses in on us we avoid, much like the allegory painted in the movie-I’ve-only-watched-the-trailer-of Don’t Look Up. Certainly ignoring the slow death of our world is worthy of a film to wake us all up. Much like the premise of the film, it won’t. But there is also the slow death of us. That’s inevitable. But we die every day as our dreams die and as our mortality becomes clearer with the aches in our bones that creep in when we do something we’ve always done and get worse by the year. And in the close of another year, we perhaps celebrate making it to the next one, in lieu of the prior year living up to its potential. Well, here are another 365 days. Here is another chance to do or fail at doing what we ought to do. For its far too time consuming to hold our layers together. The best we can do is watch the sunrise. Run or walk or lie alone in our beds and wonder. Or do, as some do, the productive types. But how many aren’t distracted and unable to achieve all they think they should achieve in five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes?
It’s hard for me to celebrate birthdays. Since my father died. It’s hard for me to buy into this concept to teach children that they should look forward to aging. But I understand why we do it. It prepares us to discuss death with the core milestones of aging already being attached to celebration. My children growing older is of course entirely preferred to the alternative. And yet as I see how fast they grow and age I look back to my own childhood and mourn the loss of my own innocence and naivity, despite it not lasting long. For my oldest, at 3.5, I think back to myself as a young girl, likely receiving her first strapping or at least aggressive spanking, for failing to clean her room, or being over stimulated by the world and falling into a temper tantrum. I don’t remember much of myself at that age, or any age really. But seeing my children grow makes me feel a bit more sorry for myself, and also a bit more understanding why my father would get so angry. A child is just a little adult with big emotions, and those of us how are highly sensitive have even bigger ones. It’s easy to forget that we are just children. Still multi-layered, but freshly baked and needing time to settle in before being served up to the world.
My three year old often asks where grandpa is. I answer that he is far away. I wish I had some heaven to explain to him but I don’t. And I won’t. Eventually I will have to tell him grandpa is dead. Maybe that won’t phase him. As a child people are old or not old and the old die and that’s not disturbing since that’s what happens to our elders who look and act much older than us. It takes a while to truly understand that we also get old, and our parents get old, and every single person will one day be rendered obsolete. It’s a painful thought. It gives meaning to live yet is the cruelest joke ever played on consciousness.
For my son, I fear him losing those he is close to who are older as well. My father’s death before his birth will probably be accepted without question as long as I don’t mention his age at the time (67.) But then how do I prepare him for all the loss ahead of him? How do I teach him not only of mortality but of all the horrors of the world? I learned them. We all do. But it’s somehow different when we are parents and we both envy our children’s innocence, try to protect it, but also to help develop that outside layer into the firmest perhaps stalest crisp to protect them from the pains to come.
My son does not like sadness. Or being mad. Or anything negative. If you say one is sad he will immediately correct you and say “no you’re happy.” Even a “mad scientist” must be a “happy scientist” and the “mad dash” to our appointment in the pouring rain needs to be a “happy dash.” For a kid who refuses the notion of sadness and madness, it is difficult to teach him that emotions are ok and necessary. How else can I prepare him for the losses to come? How long do I hide the world from him and let him “be a kid?”
This, while my layers are shifting and settling into lumps and my outer layers slowly crack as life rumbles eagerly beneath my feet. My crumbs start to push others away. Shooting out as sweet projectiles attempting to garnish some attention and purpose. Briefly noticed and left to stain the surrounding environment. And back into yourself you go. Back into imagining your layers more taught and plentiful, your heart beating somewhere in all of that, its constant rhythm, for now, no matter what stories you carry on your shoulders and down into the earth. And the sun does rise. Over fences and forests and mountains and meadows. We all see the same sun rise and set, until we no longer do. And we all harden in time. Sliced and set aside as leftovers and eventually discarded. So what now, in this next year, minus one whole day, is there to do to refill our filling, moisten our crumble, and solidify our surface with sweetness, not just accepting the baker’s hand of time.
life with interest 