To Warp Time and Drag It Back Slowly to Life
And yet, I refuse for grief to be the yardstick of my life. It is simply another mountain that has become a part of the landscape.
To Live a Little and to Live Our Wild and Beautiful Lives
I read a simple question that daringly dragged me back to my senses: "Are you living a little or running from life?"
I've written before that all of my books are dedicated to my late sister and my late brother. In my world of words, we are still together.
The relentless labor of my lungs, once raptured by mirth, and the thousand angry cigarettes I held in my calloused hands all came rushing back to me like hushed adrenaline when I bore witness to the life disappearing from their eyes.
It was as though I were under a spell, holding on to wishful thinking as one clutches a talisman, wishing that I might be reunited with my siblings beneath a wishing star. Tears come, and so, too, does hope, like the tide returning to shore. I cannot deny myself the glimpse of seeing them as they once were, for that glimpse has become both my sanity and the arch and beam of my madness, like how reading and writing are both anchor and sail. In my solitary hours, I have built a world where they were never gone, a world where we are always together, in my little world of words and little prayers. I've always thought that if I tried hard enough, I could build a time machine like a time capsule. It is the softest tremor of my heart, my secret in the midnight hours, when I am fully sober and half-confessing.
To my late sister, my late brother, and the woman I once was: you are an eternal wonder to my eternally wandering heart, which still marvels in awe at the mere glimpse of us.
And yet, I refuse for grief to be the yardstick of my life. It is simply another mountain that has become a part of the landscape.
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Learn moreIt reminds me of the legends of Romulus and Remus, and of Prophet Musa — Moses, peace be upon him, reminds me that greatness often begins in fragile places. Both stories start with the river: abandoned boys carried by waters meant to kill them but instead delivering them to destiny. Musa, cast into the Nile by his mother’s desperate faith, found refuge in a palace that would raise both his body and his future mission. Romulus and Remus, flung into the Tiber, were rescued by a she-wolf, nurtured by nature itself. Though the details differ, the message is similar: sometimes, survival is not the absence of danger but the fierce endurance through it.
Because at the end of it all, whether you stand before collapsing riverbanks, a fork in the woods, or a fire-wreathed monster on a broken bridge, the truth remains:
You cannot control the storm, but you can stand in it without bowing your head. And every step you take on that road shapes you into someone who cannot be easily broken.
It reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood: I've always interpreted the less traveled by road to embrace uncertainty, take a chance on life, and discover what awaits beyond the familiar, all while remaining true to myself.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
After all, we cannot live yesterday again. But we can make sure that tomorrow does not become another yesterday we wish we had lived differently. To write more, laugh more, forgive more, pray more, and spend less time worrying. But perhaps dragging time back to life does not mean bringing yesterday into today. Perhaps it means recovering the parts of ourselves that we abandoned along the way. The curiosity we once had as children. The courage to begin again. The ability to find happiness in simple things. Sometimes, what we miss most about the past is not the place or the people themselves, but the person we were when we were with them.
There is still so much life to live. And while I am here, I would like to live a little. To love a little. To make mistakes, discover things, laugh until my lungs hurt, and embrace the strange, unpredictable, wild, and beautiful life that is still irrevocably mine.
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Find Your Life PartnerTo answer the opening the question, "Am I living or running from life?"
I'm now hoping a little to live a little and to live a wild and beautiful life around the clock.
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