You Can Disappear Without Leaving

It doesn’t happen all at once. 

It happens slowly. 

A small adjustment here. 

A quiet accommodation there. 

You give way. 

To other people. 

To ideas. 

To circumstances. 

To events. 

To life. 

At first it feels natural. Even generous. But if we’re not careful, we begin dissolving into the  needs around us. 

We shift with the blowing winds. 

And slowly, almost invisibly, we become part of everything and nothing at the same time.

My husband’s career as a professor fed our lives in every way. His work mattered. His students  mattered. The ideas mattered. And somewhere along the way it became my job—not formally,  but unmistakably—to keep that hungry machine fed and running. 

I learned to stay flexible. 

His schedule. 

His timing. 

His needs. 

My job was to keep the life around it moving. 

To keep him on track. 

To keep things smooth. 

To keep the world around him calm enough for him to think. 

He had his work. 

I carried the rest. 

That’s how the movie of a life sometimes unfolds. 

One day you look up and realize something quietly unsettling. 

The movie has ended. 

And you’re still sitting there in the theater. 

Parts of you have faded into the background of the film. 

And yet, every year something pulls me back. 

I’ve noticed it happens almost at the same time. 

Late winter. 

Early spring. 

Something shifts. 

I write as if I’m running out of paper. Words come quickly, one idea pushing the next. I paint  with a freedom that feels almost reckless. I sculpt strange little heads that appear without much  thought, as if they’ve been waiting somewhere and simply needed a moment to come through my  hands.

It’s a rush of making. 

But it never comes gently. 

Every year it arrives like a wave—almost a tsunami—crashing over me and dragging me out to  sea. For weeks I’m inside it, pulled along by the force of it, making things as fast as they appear. 

And then, just as suddenly, it releases me. 

I wash back onto the shore empty, spent, wrung out. 

But satisfied. 

The kind of satisfaction that comes after you’ve given something everything you had to give. That brief season of making is my space. 

Maybe it’s only for a while. 

But it’s mine. 

And sometimes that’s enough to carry me through the long stretches when there is no space at  all. 

For a little while, I have something of my own. 

And there is quiet again. 

still curious.