How We Talk About Change

Should have brought a camera, last game of the season. There will be other seasons, but everything will be different, the change evident even in still photos. Change like this seeps into skin, disturbs organs, affects judgment and hope and posture.

Isabel, my six-year-old daughter, is active, involved in the soccer game. It’s taken her the entire season to acclimate. At home, with us, she’s vibrant and garrulous; elsewhere, she’s reticent, quiet, quick to cry. She looks, finally, at ease on the soccer field.

Sitting on the sideline, my wife and I, a gap separating our folding chairs, room enough for a six-year-old soccer player to fill the space between us. Sitting angled away from each other, not enough to be noticeable to the other parents, just enough to make conversation difficult, enough to decrease the chances of shared air, one’s expelled air brought into the other’s mouth.

We’ve decided to talk about this with Isabel today, together, united in this, in how we talk about change. United in our confirmation of love for this girl, all 45 pounds of her. We haven’t choreographed the conversation, however, and I don’t know who will speak first, where we’ll do it, what words we’ll use when we talk about change.

Adjustments coming, compromises, losses. Birthdays and holidays doubled into two locations. Vacations negotiated. Dolls and stuffed animals divided across two bedrooms, or one bedroom remaining bare, sterile, a hotel room, occupied only by necessity.

The game over, Isabel running toward us, smiling, she’s played her best game and she knows it. We stand, in unison, waiting, Isabel arrives, lodges her face into the gap between us, her arms encircling, grasping with fervor. Pulled together by a young girl’s hug, pulled into each other’s space, space we used to live in. My wife and I have our fingers in Isabel’s hair, accidental wanderers, lost in a thicket of brown curls, our fingertips touching; an unintended scrape of skin. I concentrate, sentient, attuned to my nerve endings. There’s no straightening jolt, just the completion of a temporary circuit, conducting remembered electricity, minor tingles. I feel Isabel through the curls, the skin surface damp with perspiration cooling in morning autumn air, warmed beneath the scalp by circulating blood. My blood, my wife’s blood, a mingling that won’t ever be changed. We clench, a triangle of bodies, longer than usual. I press her closer.