Growing up
I see time not as a line but as a flock of starlings in murmuration, a shape-shifter swirling through the dusky light.
We’re making roast chicken, moving around each other in the kitchen. Practiced harmony. Night falls over Saturday. I’m ready to turn on the tap and pour washing-up liquid over your oily hands. We stuff the chicken with rosemary, onions and garlic. I’m googling how long it takes to roast a chicken, because this piece of information is so simple and unsticky and impossible to retain amongst all the song lyrics I learned when I was fourteen. I suddenly feel like I’m viewing myself inside a photograph, nostalgic about what’s happening right at this very moment.
If life works out, which it sometimes does, you and me are going to be parents one day. It won’t be just the two of us, but the three of us, maybe four, even five. Each newness bringing irrevocably different energy. Lit by the beam of my phone’s screen, I look at you and realise that these days are numbered. This phase of our lives fizzles around me. It’s as if I could reach out a hand and feel the arc of time as it bends to move us onwards.
“You’ll blink and you’re sixty.” That’s what they say. Life moves fast and slow at the same time. Days take years, yet years seep from my grip like a scoop of water. I count on my fingers and rewind. London, different apartment, still us. We didn’t roast chickens on Saturday nights back then. Those nights were filled with pounding techno, cigarette smoke, droplets sliding down the sides of pints. Those green versions of us, who once packed just one bottle of water for a six hour hike, made it here. It’s obvious now that just one bottle of water for such a hike is not close to enough. I imagine us sitting at a table laughing about this story with children who don’t yet exist.
We laugh in the kitchen until tears stream down my face. How wonderful is it to be in our early thirties, cooking dinner for the zillionth time. The chicken is too hot to handle but we handle it anyway, hunger overriding. Eating in near silence, enjoying one another’s closeness. The purity of this contentment. I miss it already.
Growing up, roast chicken was a Sunday thing. I am six or seven years old with knotted hair. I spear chicken on my fork and jabber about Pokémon, totally unaware that what I’m eating was in the oven for one hour and fifteen minutes because I wasn’t yet time’s keeper. I think of all the times my Mum performed this exact ritual: preparing it, carving it, serving it, washing the dishes. Thousands of dishes. I tiptoe around the perimeter of this time capsule, about to reenter it in different shoes.
The sun is always setting on something and tonight I feel it begin to set on this time of twoness. Everything is pink and peach and a chill fills the air, but I am older now so I brought a jacket. I feel prepared. Right now we’re the kind of people who plan to cook roast chicken on Saturdays and tomorrow we’ll be the kind of people who can look after other people.
All this time we were collaborating and challenging each other. We grew up when we weren’t looking. I feel so lucky to witness you now. I see time not as a line but as a flock of starlings in murmuration, a shape-shifter swirling through the dusky light.
Gorgeous piece Caoilainn. “Everything is pink and peach and a chill fills the air, but I am older now so I brought a jacket.” ✨
Aww, Caoilainn, this was so beautiful! I loved it 🖤 It felt like I was part of those moments, watching from the corner.