Time is Chicken Soup with Rice

It was 2012. I sat on a grassy knoll talking to a friend during a church activity. It was May, the weather was lovely. The details of that moment are still vivid fourteen years later. I remember my white pants and the freckles on my friend's nose. 

"It is May," I said. 

"Yeah," she closed her eyes under the sunshine with a smile. "It's nice."

"In January I saw a flyer for an event in March," I said. "I remember at the time thinking: March is so far away, it will never come. But it will. It did. And now it's May."

"Time is like that," she said, blinking and squinting to find her kids. Once satisfied, she leaned back on her elbows in the grass.

"There was a day when 2012 seemed like a fantasy. Now it is here. And there will be a day when 2012 is a distant memory and it will only become more distant."

"Hmmm."

"Time just keeps going. Teasing us and stomping on us and soothing us all at once."

She let out an agreeable grunt. 

I looked around, assessing the moment, knowing one day it would be irretrievably gone. So I remembered. 

Memory is a funny thing though. Sometimes memories are so clear it feels like they are happening again; like a soup with floating bits we can just pluck out with leisure.

Now 2012 is long gone, along with the life I had then. Two husbands, two divorces, two states and two kids later, I don't want to go back. I am also completely out of the church. But that moment, that sunny day, sitting on the grass with Tara, stays with me, preserving 2012 forever as the moment time started moving, and the knowledge that I couldn't hang on.