Crayola crayons line the streets of San Francisco. They’re not really crayons, of course, but sitting in the back seat, shoulder overlapping shoulder, they might as well be.
I had fallen asleep again— pretty typical for a long car ride (or any car ride for that matter). Kink in my neck, ache in my side.
I look over and my little brother is still asleep; my older brother has a book cracked opened— God in the Dock— but I wonder how much he actually read. Bringing books, sleeping instead. We’ve practiced that for years.
Shoulder over-lapping shoulder, thighs warming thighs. We’re getting a little too big for this, even if the three of us barely tip the scales at 100 lbs.
We’ve been to San Francisco’s a million times before, but sitting in the back seat, the bay bridge winking at us as if it knows something we don’t, I start to wonder how many more of these we have left. How many more time we’re going to pass the aux and sit cramped in the back seat of the Prius. How many more times we’re going to carry the smell of leftovers with us until we smell it in our sweat the next day. How many more “last Christmas-es” we’re going to have.
Youth is fleeting. I can’t grasp it or hold to it or cling on to it— heck, I don’t even know if I’m even experiencing it.
So it goes, as Billy Pilgrim would say.
“It” does go, whatever it is.
I like to think “it” is the small mundanities that become precious only in hindsight, but for now are just enjoyable, if at all even that.
“It” was the hours of piano and singing to anything from Sara Barrielles to Phantom to Wicked, always Wicked. We haven’t done that in two years now.
“It” was frozen fingers and wind chapped cheek bones after a seven mile run in sub 30 degree weather with father before school.
And now maybe “it” will be Saturday morning breakfasts of tilapia and fruit.
Or maybe sharing the couch (and cold feet) as we stop breathing for the 43-times-2 minutes of The Good Doctor.
“It” could very well be— and I’m willing to bet will soon be— driving to San Francisco in the Prius, the three kids-but-not-really-kids-any-more as scrunched together as the crayola crayon buildings.
It goes. It passes.
“It” becomes memories, tucked into each crevice of our mind, sewn into the fiber of our being, and “it” becomes college adventures and grad school and new loves and molded lives.
And maybe someday, “it” becomes sitting in the driver seat and looking in the rear view to see three not-kids-any-more with different faces and different stories crowded in the back seat.
I can’t really even begin to fathom change, although I know it’s coming. It’s imminent and so, so near.
But sometimes— right now— I feel like if I look hard enough, I can see Now stretching on for forever: now with my little brother’s fading purple jacket and his burrito and sprite at home; father at the wheel and all his pictures that we say annoy us but really make us love him even more; mother with her gifts and excited stories about work and her highlighted hair and goofiness when it comes to pictures.
And my older brother, too, who has changed so much but means so well. Then there's me. I don’t know who I am sometimes, but for right now, I’m a crayola crayon, nestled in its case, a little cramped, a little dull, but snug in its little pack.