15 days

15 days.
cut off and wrapped in butcher paper like a roast. it's heavy, 15 days. a large chunk of time that would take hours to cook properly.
a long vacation, a trip to a far away place. two weeks, give or take a day. enough time to get into the groove of really forgetting about counting the days, until they start counting down to the end.
i spent two weeks at a dramatic arts camp when visiting my dad one summer. we sang songs from fame. i can't sing. we ended with a bbq at the park near my dad's house and i don't remember even one name from anyone i met there. i don't think they remember me either.
the first 15 days of my relationship with bryan were like taffy spun over and over, on rotation. it was mesmerizing and we walked in circles around each other, not even noticing the sun and the moon. sometimes i think those first 15 days are the glue that keep us attached at the foundation, no matter how far we might drift in the currents. like seaweed, our pods floating on the surface miles apart, our roots entangled and unable to separate.
my first "boyfriend" was in eighth grade. his name was tony and we "went together" for two weeks. we talked on the phone twice in that time, my preteen phone with the locking phone book compartment that didn't really lock. it looked like the kind of phone that you would find in an office building and i imagined myself driving a jaguar and working in san francisco with a fancy job and boyfriend. i broke up with him at the end of two weeks. we had kissed once and never spent time together outside lunch. he was in seventh grade, apparently fueling my pattern of dating men slightly younger than me.
dash is 15 days old. we are getting to know each other a bit and in that time i have noticed that the sound of his breathing is a collage under my skin. overlapping the bits and pieces of the other parts of me and i can't remember what my skin looked like before i compared it to his. his little high-pitched scream when he wants to feed and the last 15 (or so) hours of him wanting to nurse pretty much nonstop, if for no other reason than to have my undivided attention. i remember thinking the biggest accomplishment of my life when i first had finn was that i was able to keep her alive and fed for the first two weeks. because i wasn't sure why they let me take her home and i was completely unoriginal in feeling that way. this time around, i had my mom here for a week, sadie is here now and bryan gives finn as much one on one attention as he can since i tend to have a baby attached to my body the majority of the day. except for these moments, four to five in the morning, where finn screams because she was dreaming about witches and she doesn't want to go back to sleep. dash is asleep and finn is next to me on the couch, telling me she loves me. in 15 days i will have a child that is one month old and we will be moving. change the only constant, the familiar feeling of the seaweed pods bobbing at the surface, crushed under my feet at low tide.
15 days.