Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Maybe it’s because it’s Fall. I’m in a mood I get in sometimes. I feel suspended in the moment and it seems extremely important to look at everything so closely.

Once when I was driving with my grandfather from Bend, Oregon back to Los Angeles and I saw the sun in the Eastern sky, falling through the clouds like water, little splashes of rainbows being refracted in all directions. And I thought to myself, I’ll remember this forever.

There are times in life when you can feel change coming for you. I happen to think this sense is more developed in me because of where I come from and who I am.

I’ve always had the idea that I was meant to be a fixed point. I never imagined growing up, I’m always surprised to be every age I turn. Maybe that’s why I care so much about goals and achieving them. I’m clawing my way through a timeline I was never meant to inhabit.

But when it gets this way, it feels like a kind of weightlessness. It’s the same sensation as I had in that truck watching the sun pour out onto the world.

After I saw the waterfall of sun, grandpa hit black ice and flipped the truck.

We were upside down for a little bit. I got a small burn on my neck from the seat belt. Some farmers heard the crash and used their tractor to flip us back over and pull us from the ditch. A bunch of our stuff had flown out of the camper cover and was strewn all over the road, including a silk eye pillow that had smelled like lavender and was never the same again.

I kept that moldy thing for months and fished it out of the trash when different parents threw it away. Mourning something I couldn’t articulate then. A version of me that didn’t feel time passing