I take a break from reading, On The Road, and look up from the pages. I, too, once wanted a life where I can just pack up a bag and jump on the road without a plan. Now, my life cannot go a day without planning. My thumb between the pages, contemplating whether to go back to reading or to go to sleep, my eyes land on Lucas’s wooden cube learning center. The one where each side presents a different puzzle, instrument, or beaded wire roller coaster. It’s probably due to our fireplace, but the colors painted on this box never looked so vibrant. So rich and saturated. And so my eyes wander to the rest of my living room to notice the light from the fire bouncing off of all his toys like sparkling jewels. In the beginning, I dreaded filling our house with such colors. But now, the toys seem to blend into the room. Embedded within the sofa cushions, peeking from under the credenza. Piled high in a child’s treasure box. Continue…

My Dear Lucas,

I don’t know what took me so long to write to you. I’ve had this plan to write letters to you from the day you were conceived. I’ve been carrying you for almost twenty five weeks now and it seems as though I am just barely ready to tell you what’s been aching my mind.

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Every time I fall asleep into that Land of Nod, I trip back into my seat on the coach bus back to Amsterdam. It is impossible to sleep erect on these seats that can incline but only when there is no one behind me. Every seat is filled and dark. Everyone silent with their eyes closed. A cough, a rustling and squeaking of seats. Blue lights aglow above their heads, except for mine is a bright halo of white above my knees where my notebook and pen lay waiting. There’s no where else for me to look. The window beside me is dark with miles of country side and outside the lights in the distant no more than the fading twinkling stars in the sky. My own reflection glares at me in that glassy black void. It’s rude to stare.

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A golden leaf flutters down beside me onto the table and I pick it up to discover a pale yellow shell of a spider. Hollow and transparent. Beside it, a filmy drop of web still holding onto its leaf and the spider’s carcass from which it was spun.

I think about how everything is like something else. How my stories will outlast me. That our web is stronger than we are. So it is no wonder how long and arduous the task to write a story. And is it really ever done?

And how lovely to think that these stories we spin are the means to carry us through.