The Art of Letting Go

He claimed he was a genie, though he looked nothing like the blue men of magic with which she was familiar. He had tan skin and dark eyes, with a thick head of gray hair that matched his long beard. There was nothing that indicated he might be something more, other than a wisdom that hid in the wrinkles that framed his eyes and a knowing quirk of his lips. But he appeared from a lamp after a brush of her fingers, and she didn’t know what else to believe.

He told her that unlike genies she might have heard of, he was not enslaved. He existed only for the moment of her wish—never before, and never after. And unlike the genies of myth, he could not grant her three wishes. Just one.

Lily sat on the bed, a folded pile of laundry falling to the ground, forgotten. One wish. She marveled at her luck. She had found the lamp just that morning at a garage sale, after the woman running it had given it to her free of charge. With the genie before her, she wondered whether the woman knew what awaited in the lamp. Strange to let something like that go, she thought. But she was grateful. She could use a wish.

She thought about what she might wish for, and the possibilities seemed endless. There were a thousand things that might instantly ease her stress. Like a laundry machine that could fold clothes, she thought with a glance at the pile on the floor. But she shook off the thought. She wanted to dream bigger.

She could ask to stay young forever. She thought of her runs with her husband, how the wear of time and strain of childbirth had already made her body slower than it used to be. She would never have to let go of those runs, never have to submit to the anchors of age, if she could hold onto her youth.

But her husband would. She thought about wishing for them both to stay young, but she also had to think about her children. She didn’t want their kids to grow old and move on without them, and it seemed cruel to wish that they would remain six and four for eternity. She let the idea drift away.

She could ask for riches. She would retire, spend more time with her kids, go on those vacations they had planned but never done. Her husband could retire too, and it would just be the four of them, living with ease, for the rest of their time.

But she wanted more than that. She thought about the last six years, and how her children had grown in the blink of an eye. After the birth of her first child, her mother had told her to value her time—that the days would be slow but the years would be quick. Lily could see the truth in those words, and at times she could feel the slipping of time so acutely it was like it was physically running through her fingers.

She had been thinking recently that maybe if life was less slippery, it wouldn’t seem so short. If she could dig her fingers into a moment and drag time to a halt—if she could sink into the smell of her son’s hair and just revel in the sensation of holding him—then maybe it wouldn’t hurt as badly when the smell faded and he became too big to hold.

That’s it, she decided. She wanted to make life less slippery.

“I want to be able to freeze time whenever I want and live in the moment,” she told the genie.

The genie smiled at her. “As you wish.” And in a poof of dust, he was gone.

There was a beat of silence, and she wondered whether she should test her new gift. Then the silence was broken in a flurry of squeals, as her youngest burst into the room and collapsed onto the bed with a request for chocolate milk.

Lily scooped the boy into her arms and hoisted him onto her lap. He grinned up at her, proudly displaying a full set of crooked teeth. She pressed a kiss against his forehead and thought to herself, This. Let me hold onto this.

With that thought, the world stilled. One moment, she was holding her son, and the next she was outside her body, watching from across the room. She could see herself with her arms wrapped around the child, but she could not feel it. She had her own body—she held up her hands before her just to be sure—but when she placed them on her son’s back, she felt nothing. Her stomach twisted. This was not what she wanted.

She wanted to freeze time and sink into a moment, not observe it from the outside. She wanted to sit with her son until the memory of his tiny body in her arms was imprinted on her brain. She tried to sit where her body double was, but once she fell back into place, time resumed. In a panic, she froze time once more and jolted back outside her body.

She fell to the ground. She wanted to cry. This was not what she wished for. She wanted to call the genie back and demand that he correct his mistake, but the lamp had disappeared when he did. She was stuck with this botched gift.

After a moment of despair, she dried her tears and sat up straight. It wasn’t all that bad, she decided. She could still freeze time, after all. She could still sit here and study her son, still pause for a beat and take it all in. This could still work. She sat there a while longer, studying the small child and the steadfast trust he placed in her. She waited until the simple warmth of the moment sunk into her skin, and she felt at peace with moving on. When she was ready, she fell back into her body and let time resume.

Over the course of the next few months, Lily realized that freezing time had many benefits. When she was outside her body, she could take the time to do things she never could otherwise. She could leave and run for hours without worrying that her absence would hurt the people she loved. She could take an extra hour of sleep and feel rejuvenated for the duration of the day, she could run errands without hustle and read a book without any interruptions. And whenever she wanted—when her husband looked at her and smiled, when her kids’ faces broke open in laughter, when her daughter ran into her arms after school, when her son stuttered over the words in his book—she could freeze the moment, and take it in.

The hardest part was letting time resume. It hurt knowing she had the power to stay in a moment forever, but choose to let the next one come. It stressed her to wake each morning as a clear marker of the passage of time, knowing she could freeze it all indefinitely. But if she wanted to live, if she wanted to feel her family’s touch and see what the next day would bring, she had to learn to let go.

The first hiccup came in the form of a period, which arrived one week early. At first she thought nothing of it, until the next month yielded the same results. With a sinking feeling, she realized that when she froze time, her body was still aging. She had thought that her gift had frozen her in time, but instead she was breathing, living, aging while her family stood still. She didn’t want to grow old without them and die years before they did.

So, she decided to only use her gift in moderation. Her hour-long runs were shortened to a half hour, she only took an extra hour of sleep when she truly needed it, and she froze time for her family only on the truly important moments. And it worked. Her incremental pauses in time weren’t enough to make her age much faster than the rest of her family, and time slowed just enough for her to finally catch her breath.

But even with time moving slowly, the cancer came quickly. The doctors found it in his lungs—a rarity, they said, because her husband never smoked. There were treatment options, but limited ones. As the doctors put it, We’ll do the best we can.

For the next year, she froze time without care of the consequences. After the first round of chemo when her husband was getting better, he managed to jog beside her for a mile and she paused time for three days. She stared at his body, frozen mid stride, and wondered if she’d ever see him that way again. She sobbed with her arms wrapped around her husband’s frame until she couldn’t breathe and her body went numb. Later, he read a story aloud to their kids, and they dissolved into laughter at his impressions. She spent hours in that moment, just sitting in her living room and gazing at her family, easing into the feeling of normality and home. When she finally let time resume, her husband’s laugh morphed into a cough, and she cursed herself for ever leaving the moment of peace.

Her hair began to gray. Whether from stress or aging, she didn’t know, but her husband would twine his fingers through the strands with a pinched smile, and her heart would break. She couldn’t count the number of times she paused time just to memorize the curve of his smile or feel the indent he made in the bed beside her. It was never enough.

She cursed herself for her inane wish. She should have wished for complete dominion over time, so they could go back and live in the years before his sickness, forever. She should have wished for eternal life, damn the consequences. She should have wished to die first. She should have wished for anything that would ensure that she would never have to see a world without her husband in it.

She spent a week in the breath after the doctor entered the room and said Unfortunately. She knew intuitively that there was nothing left to do, nothing left to try. Her husband would return home to die. But for a week, he was just beside her, slightly thinner and unable to sit up straight, but with an ounce of hope shining in his eyes. She would have lived with that small bit of hope forever, had she not wanted her husband to see their children again. She let time resume. And the hope died.

Four days later he was lying on the bed, their children beside him—one with their small hand in his, the other with their hand on his shoulder. His breathing slowed, his eyes were closed and didn’t flutter. She knew this was it. In a panic she froze time, stepping out of her body once more with an agonized wail. If she let time move onward, it would be without her husband.

How could she do it? How could she take another breath when he wouldn’t? How could she sleep another night when he wouldn’t be there beside her? How could she watch her children lose their father when she could just let them stay there forever, holding his hand?

She couldn't do it. She wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t let time resume when it would only let him die. She couldn’t let him go when she had the power to make him stay. She couldn’t justify it. He didn’t deserve to die, she didn’t deserve to lose him, her children didn’t deserve to grow up without a father. She knew that because of the mistake in her gift—the aging that she had so often cursed—she could stay there, frozen in that moment, until she grew old and died without ever having to see him go. It seemed like a noble option, for nothing could ease her grief in his absence, nothing could make it okay for her to let go.

Except the alternative was to stay. Heart bleeding, children crying, husband suffering. She knew that there was nothing that could make his loss okay, that could make her accept his fate and watch him fade before her.

But if she didn’t let go, she would never watch her kids grow old. She would never feel joy, never feel pain, never cry at a movie or laugh at a joke, never hold her kids or watch them leave, never again feel peace because she’s trapped in a moment of almost-loss.

She realized then the contradiction of her wish. She had asked to freeze time and live in the moment, but that wasn’t possible because life is lived in the passage of one moment to the next. It’s lived in a laugh that becomes a cough and a friend that becomes a husband, in a child that becomes an adult and a woman that becomes a mom. If she wanted to live, she had to move on to the next moment.

With her heart in pieces, she vowed to never use her gift again. She would only live time as it came and passed, and try to be as present as she could. And for every moment that she wished she could dig her fingers into time and grind it to a halt, she would take a breath. And learn to let go.

She let time resume.