Time · fiction
I feel like I'm behind in life
A story about a thirty-one-year-old woman who compares herself with everyone and discovers the universe also takes time between seeing and happening.
A vision — a short story.
At thirty-one, she kept a mental list of everything that should already have happened.
A home of her own. A career on track. A trip abroad. Maybe a child. Maybe a business. The list grew longer every time she opened her phone and saw other people's photos: the college friend who had started a company, the cousin who moved to another continent, the coworker who was getting married on a farm with little lights hanging in the trees.
She worked in a government office, lived with her mother and felt her life was stopped at a station while all the trains went by.
One sleepless night, with nothing better to do, she went to read about stars. She started with some random question and kept clicking, like someone going down a staircase in the dark. She ended up on a page about hydrogen.
She read that, in 1944, in the middle of a war, a young Dutch astronomer calculated on paper that hydrogen in space should emit a radio signal at an exact frequency. No one had a way to hear it. There were no antennas good enough. He wrote it, published it and waited.
The signal was only heard in 1951, on the other side of the ocean.
Seven years.
Seven years between someone seeing something on paper and the world confirming it existed.
She closed the phone and lay looking at the ceiling. And that's when the vision began, the way things begin when we're too tired to resist.
She saw the astronomer, young, in a thick coat in an unheated room, writing numbers under a weak lamp, while outside the city went hungry. He didn't know if he would live to see the signal. He wrote anyway.
She saw starlight traveling. A light that had left there before there were people on Earth and that, only now, was reaching someone's eyes. Late? No. Arriving exactly when the journey ended.
She saw her own mother, at thirty-one, pregnant with her, alone, afraid, also thinking life was running late. And she saw her mother at sixty, today, laughing in the kitchen with her church friends, saying the best years had been the ones after fifty.
And she saw herself, older, in a time she couldn't date. She didn't see what she had achieved. She saw only her face. She was at peace. It was the face of someone who hadn't chased any train, because she had understood she wasn't at a station. She was on a road, and the road was hers.
When morning came, she did a small thing. She opened a notebook and wrote, at the top of the page, not the list of what should already have happened. She wrote a question: what do I see that doesn't exist yet?
It took her a while to answer. But she answered.
Maybe it will take seven years. Maybe more. Hydrogen had waited billions of years to be heard, and it never stopped releasing its signal because of that.
The story goes that, at the opening of Walt Disney World, someone lamented that Walt hadn't lived to see the park, and heard: "He did see it. That's why it's here." Bairo opens his own story with that line. Read: Fifty-five years later.
The way forward
Comparing your chapter five with someone else's chapter twenty is a sum that never adds up. Write down what you see that doesn't exist yet, and give it the time the journey asks for. Being behind is often just the distance between seeing and happening.