Nothing Will Ever Standstill
Illustration by Jayda Korn.
Everything always felt so infinite when I was a kid.
We were all honeysuckle limbs and helium hearts, and I foolishly believed that everything I loved would last forever. That if I stubbornly bit down on something hard enough, I could hold it in the hollow spaces of my jaw in perpetuity,keeping everyone and everything that I loved perched safely in the gaps between my teeth. When I was younger, I naively found comfort in that belief. The only pain that I knew back then was superficial, like when I was six years old and accidentally knocked out my two front teeth. It was okay, though; they eventually grew back just the same. Everything then always did. The older I get, the more I realize that there is a certain cruelty to having to outlive many of the people we love the most. We lose things that will not grow back, like our childhood years. Or even our grandparents. We watch them age as we grow, their soft skin wrinkles in places where our limbs stretch. Time paints everything beautiful, temporarily. I never noticed it as a child, and I hate how aware of it I have become now.
I find family reunions to be particularly bittersweet. During East Coast summers, we used to pick blackberries over the hill in the bushes behind my grandparents’ cottage. It was one of my favourite traditions: my grandfather would drive me, my brother, and our cousins up the dirt road in the back of his old green tractor. He would lift us onto his sunbaked shoulders to pick berries until our fingers bled and our grinning lips had periwinkled. The berries were always the most flavourful in August, bursting between our small fingers and staining our skin purple until we rinsed our hands off in the Brador lake as the sun set on our backs. It was as if they had timed their lifecycle perfectly with our reunions each year. For some reason, they didn’t grow back this summer, and I don’t think they ever will.
Our annual family reunions created an illusion of perpetuity that I never saw through as a child. Summers unfolded before my eyes like the reflected image of two mirrors placed across from each other, creating an endless horizon. With each passing year, I began to notice the illusion crack more and more —August bit down on the simple moments until I was left questioning whether the places I loved as a child ever truly existed in the first place. The small moments, traditions that unfold each year with muscle memory, make our favourite people and places feel infinite. The magic of our childhood comes from our naive tendency to believe in this imperishability. As I got older, I realized I had started holding on too tightly to things that had no reason to mean as much to me as they did. I cried when I saw the bare branches in my grandfather’s backyard last summer.
I think that traditions are both beautiful and cruel; they create a facade of permanence and try to ignore the passage of time. I always figured that traditions rely on stability; I assumed they depended on the presence of certain beloved people, places, or things. Yet, they can evolve over time—roles can be passed down from one generation to the next. Maybe one day my parents will lift my children onto their shoulders to pick berries in the summer. It will still be a beautiful moment. The irony of life is that change is the only constant we have. In the bigger picture of time, everything is fleeting, but only the actual moment is life. I think as humans, we tend to cling to traditions because they offer the illusion of permanence. We pick a moment to relive, or a feeling to recreate. And we recreate it until it feels everlasting. We will hold onto that moment, stretching time between our fingers, trying over and over to make it last forever.