Juncture

junc·ture [juhngk-cher]
noun
1.a point of time, especially one made critical or important by a concurrence of circumstances: At this juncture, we must decide whether to stay or to walk out.

season melts into season
as we grasp at fading memories
like the fingers of a tide
clutching at the blowing wind

week blurs into week
when we turn around to part
and I face only its shadow
shapeless- without end or beginning

day ascends into new day
until the night beckons us
shrouding fond remembrance
with bittersweet reality

moment slips into moment
each its own fairy tale
yet slowly growing part
of a montage of yesterdays

second by second
we seize the here and now
mocking the sameness of this place
while savoring its security

sunset by sunset
we stretch evening like rubberbands
and feel the hard snap of history
the moments after

fortnight by fortnight
the clock challenges us to drag race
when we really don’t want to finish
after all

season by season
we raise our eyes to the unhappened
pushed out onto future’s cold stage
slamming the door behind us

I was just sent this poem in the mail by my college BFF.

I wrote it two weeks before we graduated.

It’s the only piece of creative writing that I have from that time in my life – typed out on an IMB selectric.

It’s not that good. It has potential, but needs work.

I have no recollection of writing it. But in reading “juncture,” I’m brought right back to that place in time: the place where one thing is ending and another is beginning. We were ending what was, to that point, the greatest four years of my life. I was leaving behind something known and familiar and safe. I was excited and scared, reminiscent and hopeful, mourning and anticipating.

But now, I have 20 more years of life experience under my belt. And while that moment, the moment of saying goodbye to the life I loved and starting one I didn’t yet know, was singularly powerful, I realize something now.

Every day is a juncture.

Every day we raise our eyes to the unhappened and look squarely at it.

Every day we are pushed out into the future – this unknown stage.

Some days, we don’t feel it, but it is there. Other days, like I wrote about recently in The Middle Point, it’s palpable and real and a very squishy, awkward place to be.

Back then, I thought that as we faced the future, we slammed the door behind us.

But we don’t.

We keep it open a crack, don’t we?

To let fragments of our past slip through on the draft. We want them there.

It’s not always for the best. Those fragments sometimes become a tourniquet of fear. Other times, they are swords, giving us strength as we step into the unknown with more knowledge than we had before.

And sometimes, they are there for reasons yet to be discovered.

But they are there, shaping, influencing and driving us.

I wonder why this bit of my past slipped through on the draft this week. Was it to remind me that writing has always been a part of who I am? Was it to reassure me that the discomfort I feel with being middle-aged is simply another juncture? Or is the reason yet to be discovered?

Maybe it’s just there for me to realize that in some ways, I’m still the same girl I was twenty years ago, always reflecting upon junctures with equal parts dread and longing. But I’ve raised my eyes to the unhappened more times than my twenty year-old self could ever have imagined. I’ve stepped out onto the future’s cold stage and decided I would own it instead of hide behind the curtain.

And more than ever, I stretch evenings like rubberbands, not wanting my kids to grow away from me so quickly while delighting in their burgeoning independence.

For all of us, every day is a juncture.