Monday, May 24, 2010

Answer #135 - Not much.

My aunt had a small, lake cabin. I spent a few summers there. There was a swimming platform just past the dock. A conversation, years later, when the big houses filled the shoreline.

Call my mother, tell her I will be late. Give whatever is still warm on my plate to the dog or the orphans - I won't be home until morning.

Walk with me, he said, out to the water and we'll dangle our feet off the dock and the fish will come by. Just this time, let's swim out to the platform and we'll lay on our backs and we'll stare at the sky.

We marched to the tree line and found the old path - painted with berries on our face and our hands - and sat on the branches, building bridges for ants.

We declared war on an enemy state- across the lake where the houses were bigger and the children jumped from high rope swings, and mothers looked on, happily, and served them lemonade on sailboats of their own.

Sometimes after that, you and I didn't even go home.

Walk with me, he said, out to the water and we'll dangle our feet off the dock and the years'll blow by - one more time, let's swim out to the platform and we'll lay on our backs and we'll stare at the wild black sky -

- and we'll never ask why the stars blink out all at once - and why the sun goes down like it does - and why we did what we did, growing up like we did, and why we fell for the ones that we did.

Because here in the real world of blood and charades, where right moral men deal in slavery trades - what little I knew of the good and the bad is a lie, and most days, it was all that I had.

Now my dinner is always cold. And now I always do what I'm told.

But I would, if I could, I'd march to the tree line and find the old path and I'd paint with berries with my face and my hands - and set fire to the shadows that block out the view of the glassy black water and that's what I'd do.

He said, that's what I'd do.

The line between here and there.. would you have changed any of it?

4 comments:

  1. So incredibly beautiful and evocative, Krista.

    On your final line, my immediate answer would be "God, yes!" But then...really? All that happened, and all that did not, led me here to who I am. So, then again, I think maybe not.

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  2. Perhaps making changes would simply have resulted in different lies. Maybe the moments we are given, however tenuous and filled with fault, are where our comfort and consolation are to be found.
    Beautiful post...thank you again.

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  3. You made me cry with your beautiful words. The truth is, if I changed any of my life I would not know why I was crying; I would not understand how what you share is so beautiful...

    so, no...I would not change anything but try and find the strength to welcome the parts, however painful, that - to heal - resurface from the waters for a wiser and more gentler musing into a greater understanding of "..that wild black sky..."

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  4. As a avowed Pratchett fan did you read the Johnny Maxwell books? "Johnny and the Dead" in particular... Here Sir Terry expresses this changed past as putting your leg down the wrong trouser leg. Bifurcating time lines that branch through the multiverse where all that could have happened did. You, or I should say, one might have really the one regret in this formula; That you are sitting on the branch where what happened to you is yours to own, and what didn't happen belongs to another you, sitting on a different branch, a you with different regrets all her own.
    So no, I own my branch I've even spruced it up a bit with some paintings and a lamp or two...
    Chessley

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