losing time

I have, at times, lost pieces of my life.
days, sometimes weeks. I think I've lost a few months, as well.
today I felt january slipping from my grasp. I'm not sure what day it is---I have to think really hard about it throughout each day---and I'm not really sure what all has taken place during the past 6 days.
I think I will be losing most of january this year.

this happens to me when grief and loss slip into my life. I lose time. time becomes a strange concept: I watch the hands go around the clock, I see the digital readout change from one hour to the next, but it feels as though I'm living outside the boundaries of time. I go to bed at a typical bedtime hour, and I get out of bed at the usual time. but I can't hold on to time's structure as it seems illusory; time has become a nebulous concept.
today, I have to count backward to figure out how long it's been since we came home from the hospital, and I come up with 3 days and 90 minutes.
whatever that means.

clara is a tiny hispanic woman who has been in our lives since jake was a baby. today she came to visit, and brought us a plant, her radiant presence, and the gift of these words of Khalil Gibran:

"For what is to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless ties, that it may rise and expand and reach God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance."

I cried as I read these words, recognizing their veracity, and their power to help us keep pushing toward our individual mountaintops.

jake's journey toward his mountaintop has taken 19 brief years, and he pauses now before he begins his climb.
during those years I have lost small pockets of reality, of the clock-world. and as he works his way through this pause I will hover in this illusive place, and soon look back to see that I lost these weeks. lost them, yet spent them well in a state of being, a state of presence, a state of connection with a future time.