When I walk through the streets of London to get to the office, leaves blow around the pavement, collecting around resting pigeons and the odd end of a badly smoked cigarette. If you stand still long enough, you can see a plastic bag whist by you in a breeze, its blue stripes of the national chain still visible despite the sun’s bleaching, heading off to an unimaginable future that is far more heady than the past it seeks to escape. A chill will reach up around your ankle, caressing it. My fingers turn white, exposed to the air. Autumn is coming and it didn’t even have the patience to wait until September to arrive.

I look at my high heels and the steps they’ve taken. This morning I was in a business suit trying to chug down a cup of coffee and eat my slice of toast, while kneeling down beside a toddler potty promising rewards if they would do a wee wee. Hours later I was in a fast-paced business bid, presenting the hell out of my company, my product, my team, myself. My legs itch from the seats of trains and I get small flashes of my wrist, which remind me that there are two little people burned not only into my heart, but into my skin as well.

As if I needed reminding.

My life is a constant dichotomy. It’s one I no longer fight. The business suit and the nursery rhyme singing sessions exist in my world as parts of me, not parallels of me. It took me a while to get here, but I am comfortable with the evolution.

Around the house the trees are shaking and shifting. The edges of the maple leaves look like they’ve been dipped in dirty tea, and you know that they are reaching old age and are crippling under it. Another year is passing by.

When I was a kid years passed by so slowly that time seemed to hang frozen in time. The older I get, the more the seasons fly past in a frenzy of leaves, sneezes, bare arms to the sun and photos which record the lines showing up on my face like so much time delay photography. Look at my photos of years past and map the rings of my tree.

And I remember that the past tells me one thing, it tells me who I was and where I lived. The present is something entirely different. It’s not the art of re-inventing myself so much that I wonder about, but that I ever thought a person could be re-invented. Somewhere along the line I learnt that you can re-invent yourself, but the foundations of who you really are will someday break through the concrete. When that happens you have to put your tools down and break that person out, because they need to be heard. My past showed me one thing. My present shows another. My future is as unknown to me as anyone’s future can be, but there is something marvellously comforting in that, even under the mild fear of the unknown. I don’t know what’s ahead, but I know that I can look forward to how it shapes and changes me, and that I will be along for the ride as the twins grow and learn.

The way my life is, sometimes I am afraid to breathe. If I exhale too loudly someone – the gods, the fates, the neighbour – will hear me and notice me and take a look at my life. She’s got too much, they’ll say. She’s too happy. Can’t have too happy. And even though I will protest that my life is not perfect – and honestly there are flaws, of course there are – I will lose elements that I hold so dear, parts of my life that give me color, give me balance, give me wings. It’s a short old life that we get to lead. And living it before our edges turn brown and we start to loosen our grip on the branches is a priority that we don’t always remember we have.

Maybe I’m not really that different from the plastic bag I watched in the wind, the small white handles of it dancing like a Fantasia fairy. Maybe the past that I came from is what shaped me, but the rest of me is free to fly, to flee, to fuck up. Maybe it’s not escaping, it’s about being set free and loving every moment you have as long as you have it.

-S.