👀 The days are long, the years are short

My dad passed away a month ago. I'm still trying to grasp his absence from this world, and getting back to work has been its own kind of slow. I spent most of February in Aguascalientes with him, with a feeling of dread and helplessness. If you've ever sat beside someone who is severely ill, you know time can move so slowly it almost stops. You notice what you otherwise wouldn't: breathing patterns, street noises, the sounds in the hallway. The floor tiles, full of sliced fossils… relics of other beings, pressed into stone millions of years ago, now lining the floors of an oncologist's waiting room.

Back in DC, the cherry trees are fully in bloom outside my window. They turn into light pink clouds every year, stay for about ten days, and then let go all at once. Last year, I went to the National Arboretum to draw a weeping cherry tree, a hundred years old, its limbs propped up by wooden posts in what looked like a sculptural installation. Sometimes, drawing—or any form of art, really—feels like an antidote to time passing. But it's an illusion. The drawing was just another layer added to that tree's story, inserted into a complex and merciless timeline. I had a great time notwithstanding!

here's a phrase I hear often as a parent: the days are long, the years are short. I used to think it was about children growing up too fast. Sitting in that waiting room, I started to think it's about all of it. The fossils on the floor. The blossoms outside the window. The people we love, who are here, and then are not.

Ourselves, next. Hold your loved ones. Tiren más fotos. Stay curious.