| ::08:05:09::
::: Learning To Fall :::
I got drunk today. Not just tipsy, but shamelessly blinded to fight away the bitter rage. I think I enjoyed it, twirling back to that familiar space, where fear informs and I do not own my own hands and feet. Secretly, I am sure there six instead of five toes, that I am incapable of pointing them forward. And I blame You for the ache, the failure. You said there were five. You offered to carry me. Remember those days of willful exertion? Majestic flips and ever hopeful skips, that you would see me worthy and mercifully grant me release from this too heavy yoke. Did you ever notice? Anxiously I await your permission to, at last, take just one step. In my fantasy you do this, just in the nick of time before I collapse in dramatic despair or, better yet, expire, exquisitely martyred, as I always knew I would.
In either case, it is You, not me, who holds the outcome. I’m off the hook, exempt from the natural and unavoidable grace of learning to fall. In the still night I never know that sometimes I stumble, always did. And that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. It’s really quite sad, isn’t it?
Yet it is also perfect in its dysfunctional geometry. Woven through this careful interlacing of denial and unforgiving, is the glorious promise that I am safely locked away from the stub of your embrace. You can’t get in. I can’t get out. And the resulting hopelessness becomes the needed price I am willing to pay.
I am not aware of having made this deal. Nor how much is vested in my elaborate design. How meticulously I arrange the layers of arrogance, judgment, and criticism to insulate against the cold shame. You don’t know I am doing this, or so I think. I pretend I am just a very complicated snowflake, nearly melted by your glance my way. I teach you to be careful with me, upon threat I will disappear. When the truth is that I never was. You never held me at all. I was too busy dancing around you, lost in my own song, trying to control the moon and the stars.
Had I looked up or out to see you doing Your own beautiful dance, or heard the sweet longing of your serenade, perhaps we could have met, and I could have known a thing or two about faith, about love.
But I didn’t. I got drunk today. And I will tomorrow, too.
Written by: ~ Trisha Mathews |
