On Time
On leaving the United States, landing in New Zealand, and learning to let time carry you forward.
There are moments when you don’t know how time keeps moving.
Like standing in line for the flight that will take you away from your home forever, boarding pass in hand, kids in tow, heart pounding in your chest, everything seems to freeze.
But the minutes pass. Time gently takes you by the hand, and soon, your feet are moving forward, step by step, carrying you away.
The doors shut, the pilot tells you to prepare for takeoff, and as the plane lifts, you feel your lungs fill with the oxygen of being carried away.
It’s a cliff, and with your family, here you are, jumping straight off of the edge, and the free-fall is a crowded cabin, a toddler force-feeding you pretzels, and fitful sleep with tiny feet in your face. It is hearing after both an eternity and a single moment that we’re ready for landing.
“Kia ora, and welcome to New Zealand,” the pilot crackled over the speaker, and I caught my love’s blue eyes as we both realised that landing was imminent. I felt the free-fall in my diaphragm.
Moments like that define your entire life. Jumping, together, into the unknown.
And we were not ready at all, but the doors cracked open, and our feet moved, kept moving, stayed in motion, through queues and lines and customs and stamped paperwork and out into the dawn of the day, where it was humid and smelled like the sea. We stepped outside and felt the air for the first time, holding steaming mince pies in the cold of winter.
It was warm, though, for a winter morning, we marvelled.
After both a single moment and an eternity of waiting, we were on the road, time opening our doors for us, buckling us in, lovingly. My husband, white-knuckled, was driving on the wrong side of the road, and the children and I twisted like vines around ourselves to see everything outside the windows. The lush and green. The rolling hills. With a gasp, the expanse of water rolling over the dry mountains that live inside our skin.
There is nothing like experiencing a new country for the first time.
At stoplights, my love gripped my hand. In moments, I looked at my children in their soft, round little eyes and smiled at them. They wiggled like little worms and kept repeating, “We’re here.”
My love put on a song as we passed over the Harbour Bridge. I could feel his soul swelling out of his skin, too, and it’s like we held each other there in the space between us.
I know I’ve got you, the reverse car sang to us, and you know you’ve got me.
The ocean swelled up to meet us as we finished crossing the bridge, to drive right up the coast.
We’ve got everything we need.
And we did—suitcases in the back. Children strapped in. Nothing but each other, over the hills, onto the peninsula of our new home.
The sun was shining as we leapt out of the car, the wind rushed into the house with us as we surged into a new life.
We arrived, ready to live in that new beginning forever, but time keeps pushing us forward, doesn’t it?
It pushed us to the wharf, where I met you, to tell you your mother had died, where together we crumpled like a soda can.
To the sea on the first warm day, two months later, where, after being submerged in our own grief, we finally came up for air.
To our first spring Halloween, haunting for candy among the flower buds.
To the long and dark driveway, where at the top, we picked up our little cat’s body in a cardboard box.
To places underground, where carnivorous worms glow like bright galaxies, and reflect afterwards in our children’s imaginations for weeks.
To nights of desperation, of shaking hands, of tears, of being misunderstood, judged, and unwelcome.
To the moments where, holding each other tenderly, we know we’re the only ones alive who will always try to understand each other. We are the keepers of trust, knowing what’s in our own hearts.
In each of these moments, time stopped, but the minutes walked, continued to walk, carried us through the hours and the days and the weeks and
after an eternity, and a single moment,
here we are, wrapped in linen in the sunshine, and
our hands are clasped, and I know I’ve got you,
and you know you’ve got me, and
we’ve got everything we need.
Cecily Stone is a mother, writer, computer nerd, American immigrant in New Zealand, and author of These Chasms in the Earth. Her works have appeared in Welcoming the Muse (Twenty Bellows), Poems in Praise of Libraries (World Stage Press), Gysophilia Literary Magazine, Retrograde Review, Canvas Creative Arts Magazine (Indiana University), and on a set of compost liners. Stone shares her stories of motherhood, sacrifice, and rebirth at open mics and on socials: cecilystonespeaks. On the weekends, you can usually find her alongside her husband and children finding adventure in her new home country.
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This is a lyric essay. In few words you captured the essence of that experience. Nice!