To the end.

It's a going to bed feeling heavy night.
No, not physically heavy, like I spooned too much ice cream in my mouth kind of night,
But the emotionally heavy night.

The kind when you feel thick with nostalgia,
Ripe with the precious nature of life.

The kind of night where you read a whole hundred pages of a children's novel and kind of lost track of time.
When you haven't spoken to another person for hours.
When you've      s l o w e d.
A deep inflation of breath that has been kept out for too long.

It was a flipping through pictures kind of night,
Sensing, somehow knowing a kind of end is drawing near.
An ending of a life cycle.
Like my second graders' mealworms that have gone from larva, to pupa, to adult.
I've gone to adult.

Clicking back to images,
A rerun in reverse of the moments that have brought you to now.
To this    s l o w   moment.
The moment to catch your breath from all the growth that has taken place.
Growing pains, back to the start of when you thought you knew what you were doing when you accepted the job and trudged 20 or so seven and eight year olds heaving up two flights of stairs.  A class that now brims over with 26  and your insides cringe as you think about how you really had no clue what you were doing.  And wondering....could I ever have anticipated the fullness of this year? And knowing if I had tried I would have been swallowed up all in that moment, glad its a journey of singles steps that turn to leaps and bounds.

And you see yourself smiling in the photographs,
Glimpses and snip-its of a year gone by,
And you swell.
Because for each image their are about a thousand others that are linked to that one.
To the challenge and the struggle that made that one possible.

It's going to bed lost in this maze of life but yet more alerted to it.
To its fragility.
To the fact that you are so small,
But that in fact this is your place,
You fit in this grander scheme as you rerun the pieces, puzzling together what got you to here, what got you to now, and what brings you to the end.