Playing with the edge
19 December 2011 05:16 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Or maybe your version of simplicity is the quick flip of lovers, the chase of the rush, the projection of qualities and values, the disappointment and regular rethink.
In my experience, love is not simple. Affection is not a given. There are complicated paths that fork through heavy jungle. There are walks in the dark, in the thick fog, and you are holding the hand of someone, it is warm, tangible, and you are comforted just knowing they are there, next to you in the great unknown.
If given the chance, I would become addicted to complication, to the murkier, ambiguous path, circuitous, up and down mountain passes, discovering the other, their depths and peaks, and the mundane would be replaced with discovery, surprise. This isn’t about constant excitement. It’s about challenge, about being prodded out of myself.
When I was younger, straight from a childhood of too much (instability, fighting, excitement) and not enough (attention, stability, unconditional love), I wanted a life on solid ground, an unmoving life on a plain where each summer the wheat would emerge, go from green to brown, and be mown over again, where the winters were cold and predictable and the springs fresh with expected growth. I’d come from a land of earthquakes, over-fertilized with drama. I wanted seismic stability and English gardens.
The life I have is straight and plumb. It’s paths of gravel crisscrossing fields of daisies and sunflowers. It’s maple groves where the trees and I confer from bare-boned winter to the conflagration of leaves in autumn. It’s apple orchards with flashes of pink blossoms that lead to the sacrifice of fruit for cider and pies. In short, it’s sweet and predictable with occasional bursts of seasonal color.
The things we cover over have a way of emerging over time, of showing themselves. Beyond the gravel path there lies an old-growth forest. At dusk the foxes yip and play along the border between the two worlds, chasing rabbits and mice.They kill because it is in their nature. I’ve taken to hanging out at the edge of that forest on nights when the moon hangs low. The clash interests me, I like to watch the chase, though I turn my head at the moment when tooth meets fur, right before the death shake.
That forest is alive with animal sounds, trilling birds in the early morning hours, the crunch of leaves as the white-tailed deer emerge from hidden groves arched over with briars. The foxes, the deer, the owls whose hoots break the midnight silence, they all rely on the play between forest and clearing, on what is covered over and what is exposed. They need it wild and cultivated.
The (overextended) metaphor has gone beyond love. We expect too much of it, too much of the people we choose, to make up for the rest of our lives, to cover our wounds over with kisses and absolute acceptance and knowledge of our motives and needs, to be what we need when we need it, even if what we need is out of their purview. If I want to explore the forest at night, to hold a flashlight against the thick growth with a trembling hand, it is up to me to do it. I don't need to do it alone. But I do need to decide on a path.
From the November 30th prompt "An addiction," cleaned up and expanded.
Image by Nick Kenrick (ZedZap).
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