Her Hands His Eyes Entry — 3
Twenty-four years. One Saturday morning. The first sentence.
On a Saturday morning, Chris came into the kitchen, put his arms around me, and said, it’s time.
He didn’t explain. He didn’t need to. The box had moved with us from Maryland to North Carolina to Florida without ever being opened. Through four houses, two children, twenty-four years of a life we were building. It sat in closets and corners, waiting. And now it was on the kitchen counter in Florida with the light coming in. Too bright, too certain, no patience for delay.
My father’s slides.
His eyes. Everything he saw and pointed his camera at and decided to keep. For me, it turned out. Not knowing yet, when he pressed the shutter, what keeping them would mean. Not knowing there would be a daughter in Florida decades later who would need them back.
Chris held me for a moment. Then he went back to whatever he’d been doing. That is his particular kind of love. He creates the conditions and then gives you room.
I stood at the counter alone and looked at that box for a long time.
The First Sentence
I had been carrying this story my whole life. You would think that would make it easy to start writing it down.
It didn’t.
I opened my laptop. The cursor blinked at me like it had all the time in the world and was perfectly happy to wait.
I was not. I had been waiting twenty-four years.
The story was all there, every part of it. I just didn’t know yet which part to reach for first. It was more like standing at the edge of something very deep, knowing you are going in, just trying to find the right way to fall.
So I did what my father always did.
I started with what was right in front of me.
The box.
The slides.
His eyes.
I wrote the first sentence of this book sitting at that kitchen table with the box still closed beside me.
My father believed life didn’t wait.
Seven words. And once I had them, the rest began to follow. Not quickly. Not without cost. But steadily. The way things move when they’ve been held still a very long time and finally have somewhere to go.
“My father believed life didn’t wait.”
What the Box Asked of Me
I thought I knew what was in there.
I was wrong.
Not about the slides. About what the slides would do to me once I let myself really look. Some things you carry for so long you forget they have weight. You forget there is still something inside them waiting to be felt.
The box remembered.
I’ve stopped moving.
I’m looking.
“Some things you carry for so long you forget they have weight.”
