Stay with Me
a lifetime ago.
It’s 7am and it’s bright, sunlight is peeking through a small opening between the curtained windows.
I make our bed while holding onto E with one arm, she weighs almost 20 lbs so it’s not an easy feat, but we get it done. The bed looks a little rumpled, what I would give for a little room service. Pressed sheets, fluffed pillows, and a little mint, but I don’t mind, and neither does E.
I really like linen sheets, because they look lived in (*my phone just autocorrected lived to loved which I also find very fitting.)
We play this game most mornings, where I plop E on our bed and just as soon as her head hits the comforter, she lets out a giggle and a huge smile. She quickly rolls onto her tummy and begins to crawl from one end of the bed to the other, looking back to where I’m at.
I’m watching you! I say to her, pretending I’m hiding behind the closet doors, she laughs even more as she tries her hardest to scurry and crawl to the other end of the bed.
The daredevil she is, I quickly grab her before she tries sliding off the edge of the bed and plop! back in the middle of the bed she goes. She giggles and blows a raspberry right in my face, baby saliva hitting my cheeks (which for some reason feels pure lol).
I get up and open the curtains fully, letting in thick bands of sunlight: golden, warm and shimmering as if they if they sprinkle a bit of magical pixie dust on our morning. At that moment a warm breeze moves through the room, it’s going to be a humid day.
(On a very random and beautiful side note, I just learned about the Japanese word for the way light filters through when sunlight shines through the trees, how it scatters and is diffused, sometimes piercing — komorebi (“the play of sunlight through the leaves”). Of course there is no direct translation for it, but how much I love this light and how I seem to capture it over and over again.)
真夜中のドア / Stay with me (Mayanoka No Door) by Miki Matsubara comes on while baby and I play, I literally just heard this song last night and I’m already in love with it.
It evokes feelings of nostalgia…
missed connections…
prettiness and dancing…
twirling round while regretting something —
an unrequited love,
a love that was never meant to be,
it feels almost bittersweet all wrapped up in a city pop soundtrack.
It’s so pretty all I can do is look at E and fall completely head over the heels in love with her.
I find it so interesting to love someone so differently, so instantaneously.
How in love I could be with someone, that it brings me to tears to just think of it.
How I loved her from the moment she was born, how much I cried when I heard her heartbeat, and how much I love staring at her when she sleeps.
We’re 8 months into our journey, time is now marked by her.
Time. Moves slow.
We’re checking out at Trader Joe’s, it’s the Sunday before Labor Day and it’s not as packed as it should be, which is nice, because there’s plenty of things in stock.
As the cashier scans our cart full of yogurt, plums, celery, figs, a packet of Italian sausage and burrata ravioli for tomorrow’s dinner, packed salads, Persian cucumbers, berries and more daisies than I can count, she asks me something rather unexpected:
What are your goals for the rest of the year? There’s just a few more months until the new year.
My birthday is in December, I reply. So I always feel like that marks a new year for me. I get to start again. No matter how the year went, my birthday marks a turning point. I’m not just getting older, I get to reflect on the year that has passed.
She responds with, Oh! I’ve never really thought about it that way.
J plays Stay with Me, and I ask him: you know who this is?
And he goes on to tell me about Miki’s life, how successful of a singer she was, when she found out she was sick, she wished she had spent more time with the people she loved instead of focusing on her career. She ended up leaving her music career behind, and moved back in with her parents after getting diagnosed with cancer. She passed at 44 years old.
It breaks my heart a little upon hearing that.
Talking about Miki and what life would have looked like if she had chosen a different path leads us to talk about about versions of ourselves, existing in other universes, living parallel or radically different lives.
What does my life look like over there (in that parallel world)?
What does it feel like?
What do I do?
What am I into? Who am I into?
Who am I?
Does that life feel wild and carefree or soft and ordinary? Or can it possibly hold both?
These days, I find myself contemplating the different roads that were presented to me and what could have been and how I landed here, in this life.
At 25, I was going to marry the man I was dating at the time (we had been together for 2 years, his family especially his grandma adored me and we spent every single moment together), or so I believed.
I imagined us moving up to the Bay area (he had gone to CSUSF for college and was obsessed with the city, I wasn’t the biggest fan since I grew up in LA but I’d do anything for love), I saw us starting a family, building a future together but… we ended up breaking up.
How depressed I felt.
When I finished graduate school, I was going to get a job as a curator at a top museum, or so I believed. Application after application, rejection after rejection, eventually led me to teaching art history and ESL to international students at the smallest private university that ever existed.
How ashamed I felt.
When I met J, we had all the time in the world to start a family, first we had to get our finances in the right place, we still needed to grow into each other, not to mention survive a pandemic… even as these areas began to progress two years of trying passed and we needed support along our fertility journey
I believed I’d never become a mother, that I’d never have a child of my own, but I was happy to be wrong this time.
Life had a beautiful surprise up its sleeves.
E is proof to me that magic does exist.
That wishes do come true.
That even if I could do it over, I wouldn’t because then would E still have found her way to us?
To me?
She’s real - J says over and over again.
Your writing Joscelyne is so magical. You capture the small moments and feelings of beauty and love in the everyday and I am always pulled into your world.
It’s so trippy to think of parallel lives, or what if life had of gone a different way. The little miracles, just like E, really do remind us that everything happens for a reason. That sometimes heartache or disappointment is just bringing us one step closer to the greatest love of our lives. 💛
powerful, magical, and beautiful. what an insight into the small moments in your life, the mundane turned into something extraordinary. I loved reading this truly ❤️