It takes time

                We’re not all put together on an assembly line.

            We don’t come prepackaged with memories from the times we hurt the most or stories from the times we knew what it was to feel . . . we’ve gotta make our own.

           And we don’t come already covered with the scars we tell the stories to for our Friday-night exclusive friends over rum and coke—we’ve got to find them somewhere along the lines that pass by on highway “Hey, this one looks like a buttocks!” and, “My God that one hurt . . .” 

            They sneak up on us somewhere along the falling off the playground slide when you were a kid because you weren’t supposed to keep climbing up it the way you that you did, and falling off that same slide because you drank way more than you’ll tell yourself you did.

            We don’t all come with the same stories to tell, and we don’t all find ourselves at the same time as the other. We all don’t realize who we are in the instant that it’s your identity that your childhood dog digs up from the ground in the backyard and not its favourite bone.

            It takes time, and that’s what you’ll tell your first son when he asks you when his first armpit hair will sprout.

            You’ll tell him, “I didn’t get mine until I was fourteen,” even though you knew as well as your parents on the day you burst into their room with tweezers thinking it was a tick and wanting to get it out that you were thirteen. But you can’t tell your son that because right now he’s thirteen . . . and a half. He’ll look forward to it for the other half of the year, and on the day of his birthday and his armpits are still as smooth as his ass was on the first year of his life, you’ll tell him, “It takes time . . .”

            Because you know as well as anybody that what happens to one doesn’t have to happen to the other. The same goes for alcoholism and cancer, and bone marrow disease and leukemia and hang nails and crooked teeth.

            But more than anybody, the daughter of a father sitting in his living room chair with a bottle of gin for every day that he can’t remember, she’ll know that this isn’t something that everybody goes through. And she’ll know better than anybody else that it isn’t fair, because it’s not her fault that she’s forty-three years old and having to watch her father slip away without remembering the colour of the first tricycle he bought for his daughter.

            She’ll tell him everyday, “It was green, Dad,” and he’ll put that into context when snapping out of his snooze and putting a name to the colour of his bottle of booze.

            It’s green . . . duh.

            The parents of a son whose first ten years being spent in a hospital will tell you, “It’s not fair,” because they know just as well as this guy’s daughter that what’s happening to their son doesn’t happen to everyone. And to them, that is not fair.

            So when he’s asleep and it’s safe to show that they’re hurting in a way that’s different from how he is, they’ll sink into the bedside chairs and think, “How am I going to get through this?”

            And he’ll wake from his slumber and tell them, “It takes time.”

            He’s ten years old and knows as well as anybody with leukemia that it’s not fair for him to be sick the way that he is. He knows as well as anybody without leukemia that it’s not something that everyone has to go through. And when he asks himself if he’s going to get better, he’ll tell himself, “Yes . . . it just takes time.”

            Because in the times we feel to the point we tell ourselves we don’t want to, easier than turning it all off is accepting reality for reality and telling yourself:

            “It takes time.”

           So if the day should come that you find yourself in need of a hug with no one around with two willing arms, and you can’t remember the last time you felt like you’ll find that person one day, remember the time you felt your mother’s arms around you when the nightmares shook you awake at night.

           Tell yourself you had it once, and you’ll have it again. Tell yourself what happens to somebody doesn’t have to happen to everyone.

           They’re just three simple words to find assurance in during the times you think that there is none:

           It takes time.