The synchronicity of these dates now is so beautiful and sad to me
“What time is it?” I say to my spouse Janyce lying beside me in the dark. The sunlamp has yet to turn on but it feels like we have been sleeping forever.
“It’s five o’clock,” says Janyce.
I reach one arm out from under the comforter and over her shoulder. Our dog has left the spot at the bottom of the bed sometime during the night and now has her head next to Janyce’s on the pillow. I stroke the dog’s fur before I get up to grab a glass of water in the kitchen.
“It’s not five, it’s only four,” I say on my way back to the bedroom, a glass of water in my hand.
“We turned the clocks forward, remember? We talked about it,” she says.
Right. I climb back into the bed and find a rare spot in the very middle just as Janyce gets up. Swirls stands on my back for a second and then jumps off, her nails clicking on the hardwood floor as she trots out of the bedroom to find her chair in the living room. “Janyce is probably making coffee,” I think. “I should get up,” but instead I drift back to sleep.
Last night, we watched a slow moving film about a father and daughter on a vacation together at a Turkish resort. It was moody and emotional with images so full of pain and tension, the kind of film I want to watch over again just so I can fully understand how the filmmaker put it together. In Aftersun, Charlotte Wells takes her time telling the story evocatively, lyrically, like a poem, or a dream you have when you fall back asleep again in the morning when you really didn’t need it.
I regret that extra hour. I wake now to Janyce’s voice in the bedroom, the sunlamp on full blast. I am disoriented and troubled, disturbed by how my subconscious mind had decided to play around with what I had leftover in my brain, unprocessed from the night before. I see Janyce looming over me.
“I made coffee.” she says.
“I’m getting up,” I say. I lay there a few minutes longer and try to shake off the dream. I don’t remember the words or the action, just the emotion, just the feeling.
This year marks the 10-year anniversary of my friend Sandy’s death. I think about her all the time, but not usually on any actual anniversary date. The memories come in odd moments, triggered by the tiniest little detail that happens to catch my eye. One of our mutual friends has organized a brunch for a group of us in a couple weeks. We’re all gathering together for the first time since the pandemic, visiting their new house, reminiscing about Sandy and swapping stories and memories.
“You are not going to believe this,” I said to Janyce last night while scrolling through my Instagram. “Steven is getting married on the same day as our Sandy get together.”
“That is crazy,” said Janyce.
“Well, now I know what we are bringing to the potluck. Champagne and a wedding cake. Sandy loved champagne,” I said.
Last year, I scrolled through an Instagram post that alerted me that Sandy’s only son was engaged. I commented on his fiancé s photo, letting her know I was a friend of Steven’s mom and I was so happy to hear the news. She and I volleyed a few texts back and forth and she told me she would love to talk to Sandy’s friends sometime. I said we would do that. But then a year passed like it does.
My friend who has organized the brunch texted me this morning. “By the way,” she said. “Sandy had us buy 10 years of birthday cards and she wrote them out to Steven. Jill has been sending them to him each year. This will be the first year he doesn’t get one.”
The synchronicity of these dates now is so beautiful and sad to me. In the last years of her life, Sandy told me endless stories about her son’s Bar Mitzvah, she texted me about his college acceptance, his first real apartment, their solo trip together to Italy, sending me pictures they took of the skinny little cats that would roam the dark alleys of the old streets of Florence. Years into her diagnosis, she would say to me, “I’m just trying to get him to where he doesn’t need me anymore, trying to get him to adulthood.” It pains me to picture his wedding, knowing she won’t be there. I’m thinking today about how you never get to a point when you don’t need your parents anymore. The movie last night was a meditation on memories. A grown woman is trying to remember that last vacation she had with her father when she was 11 years old. The last time she ever saw him.
“Don’t be so morose Kristopher, my son is getting married.” I hear Sandy’s voice in my head and I have to laugh out loud. She’s right. It is just like me to choose the most melancholy film I can find on the very same evening when the Universe does it’s wild and wonderful magic act—forcing unrelated but significant things to happen together, as if they were perfectly timed to unfold this way all along.