My children have been making time capsules. They fill mason jars with treasures: tiny clay and felted creatures, drawings, poems and starling feathers collected beneath the bird feeder in our front yard.

I stand alongside my daughter as she combs the ditch for the perfect smooth stone to pack into her jar.

I watch her search. I am searching, too.

The children bury their jars in the wildflower meadow with plans to unearth them in some far off future which they can’t yet imagine.

I don’t need a jar for my treasures. I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am a time capsule. I hold within me all of my past selves—preserving moments, years, decades inside my skin. Within me is every version of myself I have ever been. They shift and move to make room for each other as each new self emerges. Each one is preserved: waiting to be sistered, mothered, held, seen.

I gather all of them in my arms even as they shift and change in my attempt to grasp. To understand.

I force myself to look at my most broken self. She’s barely twenty, looking at her reflection in a mirror on the wall of a dingy basement apartment. She’s just cut her waist length hair with a pair of dull kitchen shears. It’s piled in looping copper ribbons at her feet. Her grandmother’s voice echoes in her mind as she looks at the pile of hair:

Your crowning glory. Your one beauty.

She thinks she is worthless. She thinks she doesn’t deserve this one beauty.

I look at her and reach across the chasm. Time collapses and retracts. It’s no longer linear. My hand is on her shoulder now. I feel no shame for touching her pain. We are, both of us, here.

I give her shoulder a squeeze to let her know she is not alone. I catch a flicker in her eye. A fierceness she couldn’t feel beneath the weight of all that hair.

I breathe Rilke’s words into the past:
“This is what the things can teach us:
To fall,
Patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”

It will be three more years before she figures out how to fly. But in this moment—the now and the then of it—a buoyancy has stirred up in us both.

She doesn’t even know my resilience is borrowed from her.

She doesn’t even know the woman who’s holding her now.