unfinished

I looked down at my hands.

They had pruned.

The wrinkles holding onto the secrets shared just minutes before… or was it hours before, I wasn’t sure. The fire built earlier was barely more than glowing embers at this point serving as the only way to really know how long we’d been out here.

What unit of time would that be?

The river carried on some muffled conversation behind me that I wasn’t a part of and I could barely follow the conversation just in front of me, that I surely was supposed to be a part of.

My eyes turned to the sky, head resting on the cold, plastic edge of the hot tub.

-where did you go-

My attention snapped to the voices around me, some chatter about a story from 5th grade. Like hearing your name called sharply in the night, bringing you swiftly out of a dream.

Wait, is that story from 5th grade? It sounds like it was just yesterday, or perhaps last year, maybe 20 years ago? Where has time gone?

-where did you go-

I couldn’t shake it, the question, the voice I’d heard, the loss of time. It hung around me long after the steam from the hot tub was abandoned as I went inside to dry off next to the fire.

---

I grabbed my journal before we left for the cabin on Friday. I’m probably inflating that a bit, calling it a journal. It’s a small, purple, suede bound notebook given to me by my brother when I was still in college. I’ve used it to take notes at a bloggers conference (who was I back then… a bloggers conference?) and then again to take a few notes about a long forgotten doctors office visit, write out my work for the Apartment Therapy January Cure in 2015 and document hikes from 2017.

And on Friday night, I wrote what you read above.

Yes. With a pen. By hand. On paper.

It seemed like the right thing to do while hiding out in the woods for a couple of days. I read it aloud to my husband and his best friend and their reaction led to this post. Maybe I’ll add to it, but for now, it shall hang out.

Unfinished.

Like everything else I started in that journal.