“She is going to find her spirit.” He pipped from across the deck.
It was a Saturday. Three days before my departure.
“”What did you say, Moo?” I asked through tears. I had heard what he said but I wanted to hear it from him again: my nephew, my god monster, the love of my life. And so I pulled him in close to me, as close as can be.
“You are going to go find your spirit, that is why you are leaving.” He said in the voice that echoes, how it echoes in my heart. And then he offers that smile, that mischievous grin that will both get him into trouble and get him out of it.
Only the month before he had turned five. Under the warm April sun I wrapped my arms around him, wondering when it was that my arms had grown so small because it could not be so that five years had passed since the day he was born and he was already this big.
Time does this, moving so swiftly that you spend more time in your memories than you do in the present moment, so much so that when asked what time it is, what day it is, what year, you ask only one question in return: What does it matter?
I held him this way, unwilling to let go just yet, and thought that maybe it was not that my spirit had been lost, but I was in search of something: words, ruins, art, adventure. All of me wanted to learn what happens after love. I needed to know what happens after war.
And maybe I had never learned any of these things before. Or maybe I had learned them everywhere. But only in pieces and it was only now coming together.
There was but one thing I knew before departing on this journey:
You find what you seek.