Time is a gift, especially when it feels like extra time. In a time when we are so unaccustomed to delaying any gratification, an unexpected delay can feel like an ocean of time in front of us. Nowhere to go, no place to be, forced to sit still and just be for a short time… is truly exceptional. Today I have that gift in front of me in the form of a layover. I am just waiting at the gate, feet up in a high-back chair. I don’t want to watch the news at the bar close by, or stare at my phone. I prefer to be here, with myself, writing between two times, two lives, in the San Francisco airport.

I have begun to archive my Instagram. I thought I would do it in one fell swoop but my nostalgia combined with my love of imagery and a good composition has made me delay that, too. It now stands as a beautifully edited down version of what it was before, a longer story of my memories, real and imagined, of the past four years. Recently, I decided that it was time to archive it, to draw that line in the sand, or more so in the wet concrete at the foundation of the new life that lays in front of me. Suzi was here – I could write. The proof of which has been that Instagram account which now seems unnecessary. It is now the back story, but one that should be in that closed volume of tragedy. Now it is time for something else, and I must start with a clean slate… but for now, I have kept those images there that I really love, to look at them a few more times, in wonder of myself, in hopes that I might actually feel that wonder in myself, deep in my soul.

Who knew that connecting, truly, with myself would be so complicated? Now I feel that I must write my story, in the world, literally, so that I can rewrite the story I tell myself in my head. I must write so that when I am feeling lost, and unaccomplished, I can come back to it, read it to myself, and remember just how much fun I’ve really had.