After my last submission, I was ready to pivot to a more positive subject, yet I found many of my immediate associations with the “space in between” were tinged with negativity or anxiety. There is the daily act of going to bed every night carrying the weight of the insane current news cycle, but fearing what new things will have happened while asleep that will bring further stress. There is the space between terrible things happening to people I know and the long wait for justice. The time between a diagnosis and an available appointment for treatment. The distance between people groups who are quick to form opinions about others, though they have never truly gotten to know anyone from that group. The distance between who people say they are and who their actions show them to be.

I remember the last night in Boston when I dropped my son off at university 6,700 miles away from home, across continents and an ocean. As soon as we arrived in town, that clock started ticking, counting the space between having my oldest around all the time and having him gone. As much as it felt like torture to watch the hours and days pass, I tried to stretch it out, because what came on the other side of that span of time was infinitely worse. That last night, I’d have walked the streets talking with him until the sun came up, but he had his first classes the next day. By my hotel, we went into the subway so he could ride the train back to campus. The wait was brutal, with a small joy leaping into my heart every time the wrong train pulled in. Until the right one arrived. A few final hugs. Tears that could no longer be contained. The feeling that my heart was being cut out with a dull spoon. He walked onto the train and to the back, waving to me from the rear window. I waved back, willing myself to remember every detail as he got smaller and smaller and that mechanical monster stole him away into the dark tunnel. I sat down alone, thinking how much I hated that train. I mean, nobody hates a train, but I did. Truth be told, I still hate that train 7 years later.

On a more visceral note, this past March and April, our city was continuously bombarded with missiles and drones. On the first day, the waves of explosions came every 23-25 minutes. The space in between the waves was filled with such uncertainty and disbelief. The 5-60 seconds between the phone alarm and the blasts shaking our house brought acid pumping through my heart, as we flew downstairs to get to our “shelter”, sometimes out of a dead sleep. And the seconds to minutes between each missile being intercepted seemed to go on forever, with us not knowing when they’d stop. That is a lot of terrible space.

The more I think about it, the more I realize our lives are a series of spaces. They can’t all be bad, though, as I don’t walk around swallowed by fear and anxiety and anger. If I drill down to a smaller scale, there is the thrilling space between an idea for a quilt and the moment I burst into my studio to get started. The window between buying a plane ticket and stepping out of the airport into the sounds of a new city. The build-up of anticipation between purchasing a new book in town and curling up in a comfy chair with a mug of tea, with hours of reading ahead. And of course, the wait between sprinkling dye pigments over ice and the fabric reveal once the ice has melted when ice dyeing!

I don’t yet know what I will do with this prompt, but it’s been a walk down memory lane already, pondering the possibilities!