The color and shine of it, and the sweet/tart berry-ness. The friend at the grocery store who recommended it as an immune-booster, and who listened to the torrent of frustration and tiredness that emerged when she asked how things were going. The glass it was served in, how it caught the light. The hands holding the glass—the chewed-down fingernails, the fingers that almost always carry some evidence of an art project, the palms that are calloused from day after day of practicing on the monkey bars at school. Holding one of those hands walking down the hallway at the doctor’s office. Its warmth, its softness, despite the callouses. The extra time today spent with those hands, and with their accompanying eyelashes and cheeks and freckles.
Oh, the time. Of which there is never enough, but it’s still there—to press your ear against a chest to hear a heartbeat, to press one cheek against another, to hold hands, to talk, to listen. To realize you not only love but really really like these people around you, frustrations and moodiness and tempers aside.
Never enough time, and yet it sustains. Sweet-tart like elderberry juice, shining.
