Once in a Lifetime: Drowning in Echoes

Talking Heads: Once in a Lifetime

The water runs.

A slow, steady stream, swirling down the drain in quiet, hypnotic loops, disappearing before it can be traced.

I watch, but I’m not really watching.

My hands move—scrubbing, rinsing—but I don’t feel them.

The motion is automatic.

I blink, and my reflection stares back at me in the window above the sink.

Not just my face, but everything behind me—

A home filled with pieces of a life I built, a life I love.

And yet, in this moment, it feels as though I’m watching it all from behind glass.

“And you may ask yourself… how did I get here?”

The lyric surfaces like an old thought, looping through my mind, circling back in on itself.

How did I get here?

How did I move from one version of myself to another, without ever noticing the shift?

Somewhere along the way, time started slipping

through my fingers.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling the weight of the days.

Somewhere along the way, I started floating through them instead.

Time Slips—A Life in Fragments

The past pulls at the edges of my mind.

It rushes in—not as a story, but as flickering moments, half-formed and shifting in flashes.

A bonfire crackles against the night.

The air smells like burning wood and autumn.

Laughter moves through the trees, warm, familiar.

For a moment, I can feel the heat on my skin.

But before I can reach for it, the moment fades.

The Teenage Years—The Numbness of Survival

The cold seeps in.

Normangee, Texas. A town that feels like it exists in the space between moments.

A trailer park. A space too small, too dark, too empty.

Electricity that worked sometimes.

Hot water that worked never.

Nights spent staring at the ceiling, feeling nothing, waiting for time to pass.

No money. No car. Sometimes, no food.

A life that didn’t feel like mine.

There were two versions of my mother.

One burned bright, laughing loud enough to shake the walls, dreaming fast enough to outrun time.

She could make life feel electric—wild, golden, bursting with possibility.

Her energy could set the whole world on fire.

And then—

The stillness.

The weight of silence pressing against the walls.

A shadow behind her eyes, something too deep for words.

She would drift, fade, disappear into herself,

and I would hold my breath, waiting for the return of her fire.

I never knew which version of her would wake up each morning.

I never knew how long she would stay.

But I loved her in every season.

Through every storm, through every silence, through every light that flickered and fought to stay.

I still do.

Time passed. Days blurred.

I floated through them, waiting to be somewhere else, someone else.

The Rhythm of a Life Interrupted

A drumbeat.

A Texas night.

Trey behind the drums, keeping time, locked into a rhythm that feels bigger than us.

Bobby on guitar, a song filling the air, laughter in between the music.

Trey was alive in a way that made you feel more alive, too.

And then—

A night that doesn’t feel real.

The kind that splits time in half.

Trey was gone.

A town brought to its knees in a single night.

His mother’s screams at the funeral.

The weight of silence that followed.

The way it never really felt real.

The way it still doesn’t.

Some things, you never get over.

The Music Fades…

A dimly lit coffee shop—Shaky Ground, Lake Charles.

The hum of conversation, the smell of coffee, the low buzz of an amplifier warming up.

My brother on stage, the glow of the lights cutting through the haze.

His hands move across the guitar, lost in the music, in the moment, in something bigger than either of us.

I watch from the crowd, feeling the sound pulse through my chest.

I am alive.

And then—

The memory flickers.

The scene shifts.

The music distorts, warps, stretches.

A different stage, a different night.

Bobby again—years later, on tour.

I watch from the side of the stage this time, the energy of the crowd electric, moving in waves.

The music is loud, alive, vibrating in my bones.

I don’t know if I have ever felt more present than in moments like those.

But even those nights—those real nights—slip through my fingers now,

echoes of a room I can no longer step into.

The Void—Losing Time, Losing My Dad

The water still runs.

I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here.

I think about the time that has passed since losing my dad—

How I drifted through time, how life continued even when I wasn’t sure I was part of it.

Some days felt endless.

Other days vanished before I could register them.

I laughed. I lived. I kept moving.

But was I present?

That’s the worst part, isn’t it?

Not just the grief, but the fear of waking up one day

And realizing you weren’t really here for any of it.

The flood of memory feels like falling backward into water—sudden, consuming, impossible to resist.

Somewhere beneath the weight of time, I can still feel the ache of what was lost before it had a chance to exist.

My first pregnancy ended before I could even hold the word mother in my hands.

And yet, the grief arrived as if I had carried it full term.

The anxiety followed—relentless, sharp, shapeless.

Days stretched into months, and I floated through them, afraid of a body that had failed me, afraid of time slipping forward before I was ready.

Jamie—A Steady Hand in the Chaos

My mind wanders, and memories flash like lightning bolts.

The times we packed up everything and moved, just because.

Driving through states with no plan, no direction,

just possibility stretching out in every direction.

And then—

The rain.

Warm, heavy summer rain, falling in thick sheets.

Jamie and I, soaked to the bone, dancing in the downpour,

barefoot in the front yard, barely newlyweds,

laughing like we had all the time in the world.

Water pooling in our footprints, hunting for crawdads,

thunder rolling in the distance.

It felt like something out of a dream,

like for a moment, the world had paused just for us.

The memories keep looping, cycling, pulling me under—

Until a touch brings me back.

Jamie.

His presence is like gravity, something steady, something real.

His arms find me, his voice cuts through the fog.

A Tether Back to Now

The water still runs.

Jamie pulls me close.

My children laugh.

A sound so light, so golden, it fills the spaces between the past and now.

I let it pull me back.

The past is still there, tucked into the edges of my mind.

The loss, the love, the echoes of every version of me I’ve ever been.

The weight of time still lingers.

But for now—

I am here.