I Miss You When I Blink: Essays
Mary Laura Philpott
For John
For my parents
For WC and MG
We know, we know, we belong to ya
We know you threw your arms around us
In the hopes we wouldn’t change
But we had to change some
You know, to belong to you
—The Decemberists,
“The Singer Addresses His Audience”
I Miss You When I Blink
It’s the perfect sentence, but I didn’t write it. My six-year-old did.
I was sitting at the desk in my home office, on a copywriting deadline for a client in the luggage industry, wrestling with a paragraph about suitcases. I leaned forward, as if putting my face closer to the computer could help the words on the screen make garment bags sound exciting. My little boy lay on his belly on the rug, “working” to pass the time until our promised walk to the park. He murmured to himself as he scribbled with a yellow pencil stub on one of my notepads.
“. . . and I miss you when I blink . . .” he said.
It stopped me mid-thought. “Say that again?”
“I miss you when I blink,” he answered, and looked up, pleased to have caught my attention. He turned back to his notepad, chattering on with his rhyme (I miss you in the sink . . . I miss you in a skating rink . . .). When he ripped off the page and tossed it aside, I picked it up and pinned it to the bulletin board on my office wall.
I turned those words over in my mind while I folded laundry that afternoon. I thought about them while I brushed my teeth that evening. I repeated them to myself as I lay awake in bed. I said them out loud as I sat in traffic the next day. I miss you when I blink. I thought, How cute.
* * *
Over the next several months, I saw the note on the wall every time I walked into my office, and the phrase lodged itself in my head like a song lyric. I played with the words when I had writer’s block, tossing them about like a squishy stress ball. It would make a great title for a sappy love poem, I thought, one where the poet can’t stand to lose sight of his lover even for a split second. Or an album of goodbye songs, dedicated to a time or place that’s disappeared. Maybe a country ballad about a lost hound dog. The one that got away. Anyone could be the “you.”
It was a few years later when it occurred to me: You could even say it to yourself.
* * *
We all keep certain phrases handy in our minds—hanging on hooks just inside the door where we can grab them like a raincoat, for easy access. Not mantras exactly, but go-to choruses that state how things are, that give structure to the chaos and help life make a little more sense.
A friend of mine uses “not my circus, not my monkeys” a lot. It helps her ignore her instinct to get involved in things that aren’t her business, and it also makes her remember that people have all sorts of reasons for the things they do, many of which she’ll never understand. It’s useful for both behavior modification and acceptance.
“No one’s getting out of here alive” is one of mine. I find it motivational and comforting. I say it to myself when I’m marching along on the elliptical machine, because it reminds me that there absolutely will come an end to my time on earth, and if I want to push it off as far into the distance as I can, I need to get my heart strong and work off the sugar I consume every day. I say it to myself when I’m trying to calm down and deal with a jerk, because it helps me put things in perspective. We’re all going to die, and would I really die with more points if I took this person down, or should I have some empathy and grace and let our differences go?
Over time, “I miss you when I blink” became another one of these phrases. It helps me live in the moment. It slows me down and makes me absorb each instant instead of rushing, because I know already how much I miss things that happened in the past—how they’re right there behind my eyelids but also gone forever. When my now-teenage son is doing something very teenage son and I’m having to ask him for the eighth time in one evening to pick up his inside-out pants from the bathroom floor, “I miss you when I blink” helps me be more patient. He was six just a second ago. He’ll grow up and leave me in another second. “I miss you when I blink.” It captures the depths of my love. Could he have meant all this when he was little and scribbling, or was he just trying to rhyme with “sink”?
There’s no way he could have known.
* * *
So he also couldn’t have realized how perfectly “I miss you when I blink” captures that universal adult experience: the identity crisis. But there it is.
The old stereotypical identity crisis happens in midlife, to a man, and it features a twenty-five-year-old dental hygienist and a pricey sports car with an engine that sounds like a helicopter. The new stereotypical identity crisis happens to a woman, often when she’s turning forty, and it involves either a lengthy stay in Tuscany (ideally in a picturesque cottage) or a very long hike (maybe the trail to Machu Picchu? preferably with a large backpack). But the “I miss you when I blink” kind of identity crisis, that’s something else. Something under the radar, much more common.
For so many people I know, there is no one big midlife smashup; there’s a recurring sense of having met an impasse, a need to turn around and not only change course, but change the way you are. It can happen anytime and many times. As we leave school and enter the real world, as we move in and out of friendships and romances, as we reckon with professional choices and future plans, and sure, when we hit midlife, but earlier and later, too.