The message of our footprints take on interesting reflections.
Sometimes we don’t measure ourselves up to those here. We measure up to those we’ve never met or hardly been a part of.
You take for granted moments in life at times because you think you get many more.
Then comes a time where you wonder, had there been or more time, how different perhaps you would have become with one’s presence.
The idealistic thoughts become the strength of one’s reality. You begin to create the bars of what could have or should have been, not what truly is around you.
Perhaps this is because what is around you isn’t truly what you had in mind as to what to work toward. So, to reach beyond the ceilings you find confined to, like an ant made to be a giant, there is only that direction, up and through.
The mind is unstoppable. There, you create your destiny. There, you believe the unreachable is just one step ahead each day, each moment.
You reach.
You move.
Having lost my youngest sister before I could even be at the age of remembering her face, I feel this emptiness inside of me where I have always known and accepted; I was never actually the youngest.
It’s like an honor I have given my younger sister each time a thought of her comes across my mind. I was the youngest not by choice, but chance. She was the baby girl; I, the middle of the youngest three daughters.
Like a wise whisperer, Be careful of what you ask for, are the words I seem to always hear whenever I think to wonder what it would have been like to have her throughout my life.
Would she have lived admiring me in my leadership?
Would I have been good enough as an older sister?
Would I still have remained as is, as I was, and have continued to become today?
Having had a part of his eighteen years of life, my second oldest brother, I can only reminisce back to my thoughts of his ways, his mannerisms, his traits.
His bed, always neat to creaseless perfection. His belongings, each positioned and aligned with obvious great intent.
When I look at my desk in my classroom, each time I walk in to see its line-ups, leaving items students have given me throughout the years along with my teaching materials to similar alignments, I am to never forget to ask myself if my brother would have thought of me as perfected as he was- my guitar-playing, athletic, no body fat, egg-yolk drinking brother.
How do I measure up to those not here, I shall never know. And, yet, it is the regards I have for what I have chosen to create that makes me live up to an exceptional expectation of self.
Those deemed exceptional and faultless lead the way.
I know and imagine that had my sister lived and my brother continued to live, the reality of their existence today would have perhaps created some, while desirable at times, unwanted circumstances.
While Papa saw me as that child who enjoyed tagging along with him whenever he allowed me the chance, had I still had my youngest sister, perhaps I would have chosen to stay home (or, climbing trees and playing out in the yard with her).
I may have never picked up so much learning from and about Papa had I been entertained by the likeness of a younger sister.
Perhaps she and I would both have had to share moments where foods were scarce, being the youngest and last to arrive home to eat.
Or, perhaps I would be that “left out” one, with she receiving the saved food Papa at times did for me.
Would I have had issues with my beloved brother and my husband, both strong and fearless within their own stance? Would they have gotten along just fine as my husband suggests so? Or, would turmoil have risen had my brother been there at times I rebelled against the expectations of a wife to remain quiet and submissive, two attributes only years have left me to tame?
How can there be certainty of what life would have been had we turned a different corner or kept another chapter going?
Funny. As I lean on my thoughts of my two siblings no longer with me for self-direction of character, I have come also to the acknowledgment of those who have not left me.
My husband recently noted that they say you always think back to your first love. He mentioned that would have had to have been my crush back in second grade, the one I mentioned on behalf of my graduating class at our last reunion.
Though my dearest was serious, I had to laugh. A crush was merely just that as a child whose heart had learned to beat happily unsteady for the first time.
Love, its complexity and inexplicability to be put in words after years of having gone through many trials and tribulations is incomparable to the childish ways of one’s innocence.
Love, that one who had jumped, dropped, and even crawled into finding itself again to be steady has only to be defined by its own emotions of colors that are swallowed up at times like the love boat caught in a maelstrom- some still lost at sea, I can imagine.
I am tired today, like many days lately, because of all the events my husband and I have had to attend together for our youngest two children as we did for our oldest three.
No matter the body wanting to just hide under the covers to feel its warm embrace, I go through the motions with my husband, one day, one moment at a time.
We are in this life together as one. Breathing. Dreaming. Doing.
Little does he know that I had already came to the realization long ago of our togetherness that by not standing beside him, I would only be training him to find comfort in my absence.
I still recall my husband’s voice over the phone, his despondency after coming to the realization that for the first time, I had chosen to not travel to our two daughters’ event with him.
He had been hopeful that I changed my mind to the end.
Things get in the way of the heart, mind, body, and spirit to the degree of making decisions without careful considerations.
With the little reasons I had to stay behind rather than all the countless reasons I should have taken to thought, I had started a change of course in our togetherness.
Thankfully, I came to my senses soon enough- nothing was worth missing out on a memory without my husband.
Why create an absence as if dead if still living?
Today, he sends me yet another message, telling me how much he enjoyed playing house with me again this week, as I take it he has noted for me to have suggested my life with him.
I must remind myself how wonderful it is to receive from someone affirmation that your existence, your effort to take a good part of a memory, is not just noted, but appreciated and enjoyed.
I should not have to wait for the departure of one to wonder how things could have or would have been.
As tired as I am in these years to follow for the chapters we have left, I arrive to the maturity that not being by my husband’s side would only cause my absence in his memory, he in mine.
Whether he or I will be able to recall pastimes in our last years, I want to assure myself that we both will be insistent we each were certainly there, whether holding hands or not, talking to one another or not, holding each other or not- we held onto the gift of each given present.
Not having the recollection of my youngest sister or having briefly had the presence of my second brother, I am humbled to now arrive to understand that those we have been given to spend time with, those who have not let us go, they are that gift in time to cherish.
While I have held myself against a figment bar as a sibling to my beloved sister and brother, as a wife, as a partner, I do not think to wait to ever lose my husband before I ever wonder anything or any way of how I would have or could have been.
I can only hope that until the end of our time, my husband will have remembered me to have been there, right beside him.
In greatest effort, in my lasting years, the message of such footprints I would hope to abidingly leave, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.”
