The Ghost of Small Hands

It is 3:15 am, and the house is holding its breath. In the dark, I find myself thinking about the things we try to keep still. We hold onto small hands as if we could anchor them to the earth, as if we could stop the inevitable drift of growing up. But children are only ever passing through our lives, like light moving across a floor. We try to memorize the weight of them, the way they lean into us, hoping to build a fortress out of these fleeting, quiet moments. We are so terrified of the day they will stop reaching back. We build these monuments of memory, stacking them high, pretending that if we capture the feeling perfectly, we can outrun the clock. But the clock doesn’t care. It keeps ticking, indifferent to our desperate need to freeze the world in place. I wonder if we are holding them for their sake, or simply to remind ourselves that we were once needed.

Elena Zakharova has captured this fragile tether in her work titled Little Lady. It is a quiet reminder of how we try to hold onto time before it slips away. Does looking at this make you want to reach out, or does it make you ache for what has already passed?