Note to self: There will be days when you look at the people closest to you, the ones you move through life with every day, and you will wonder if you even know them. You will wonder, do they even know me?
You will see her freckled cheeks, her blue eyes on fire, her indignation an almost tangible thing. You will hear yourself saying the exact wrong thing, things you don't even want to say but your tongue has gathered momentum, your words have a trajectory all their own, and every word you say will be like kindling on the fire.
In that moment you will find yourself bumping up against something solid--that point where you end and she begins. And as you keep talking you will feel her pull away and instead of that solid wall of another human before you, there will be a rift, a fissure in the way you relate to one another. She's standing inches from you but the space between feels impossible to span. The rift becomes a gulf, deep and wide and black.
You drop her off at school, and sit behind the steering wheel, solid and smooth and warm from the sun; you rest your head against it and replay your words. You ask yourself where they came from and you realize the gulf was not between you and your girl but between what is and what you think ought to be. What is and what you hope will one day be. And the endless black you sensed there is fear. Fear that the two of you will be locked in that moment for life. At odds with each other, unable or unwilling to understand.
And in a sense that's what you've done; you've distilled this moment and attached to it the weight of the future and in so doing filled it with a significance it cannot possibly carry.
If you want to bridge the divide, bring the moment back. Let the moment be what is: your eight-year-old girl, strong and brimming with opinions and convictions, flexing her personhood. She too is pressing up against and pressing into the fact that she is her own person in a world of other persons. She is learning what to do with this knowledge just as you are still learning.
And this moment is just a moment.
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