life is long

It’s late and I’m tired and if I stay up any later, I’ll need to have another glass of wine and who am I kidding, it’s a school day tomorrow and what I should do is hang it up and drink some more water and get in bed, but really, really, what I have done is unlocked a photo account I’ve not visited in at least a year, a place where I keep over 11,000 photos from circa 2006–2013. I made my way to the archives and scrolled away, watching my own life pass on my screen. Oh and it’s beautiful. Oh how lucky. Oh the people I know! What did I do to deserve you all? To continue to know you! I can watch the babies I held once turn into toddlers before my very eyes. I can watch a video of my belly, the skin of it moving with two babies underneath it. I see you, and you, and you in my life, in Chicago, in New York, in Guatemala, in New Orleans, in Indiana, in Knoxville, in France, us in England, at the lake, the two of us upstate. Motorcycles, dinners in this very spot where I sit now, dinners at your place, in the city, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the hospital, the living room before they took the windows, Chinatown, standing outside the MoMA eating halal food. I see it all, I see it now like it was yesterday. Our babies still thought-clouds, our relationships as foundations still drying, our furious art-making. Keep going, keep going, life is long, Annie told me once, before I gave birth to twins.