5:00PM
For the 105th time, I heard the clock ring before starting this. I heard the sump pump kick on. I pressed the same sequence of buttons on the keyboard to start the timer.
Just this afternoon, I was yearning for this all to end. For the three times per day, 8-hour spacing to finish and I can just have a day off. When I heard that clock chime, tears came to my eyes.
I think sometimes we don’t appreciate what we have until we think about losing it. Yes, oldest cliché in the book. I believe that often I can hate on the routines and stability that I have in life, only to appreciate it when it seems to be going away.
I look around and see my whole childhood in this basement. The Christmas decorations to my left, the cardboard box from a snack we used to eat all the time as kids (company now defunct), the blackboard we used to play on, the Halloween decorations, the blanket my mother knit for me, and to my right, the model of the Solar System I built when I was in elementary school, complete with Pluto as a planet.
I think about my parents and how they’re aging and how I’m aging. Life keeps going forward, not backward. My mom will finish her radiation in about two weeks and then back for more chemo. We don’t know what will happen. We only hope.
I cry.
It’s OK to cry. It tells me that I really care about these things. That I really care about these people.
I’m surprised that I haven’t cried more during these 35 days. Maybe I held it in, knowing that the world and I have been feeling a lot of pain and not wanting to cry everyday. I don’t know.
I feel proud. I’ve done it. I wrote for 35 straight days, 3 sessions per day, for 10 minutes each session. I’ve written a book! I cannot believe it. Growing up, people always talked about how I would write a book one day, I just often doubted it. I didn’t know what I would write about. I don’t know if this is the right book to write, but it is a book that I have written.
Sometimes in life we are blessed with the opportunity to do things and we don’t realize their importance before, during, or even after. This may be one of those things. I may not fully grasp it, and yet I want to pause, breathe in, and soak up the final moment of this experiment.
5:10PM
