Meeting a perpetual past

 

I was walking down the street in a forsaken part of town when I saw her.  She was some distance away, maybe a quarter of a block.  She was pressed up against a chain link fence with her friends, maybe seven to ten of them, both male and female.  They were all lined up along the fence, watching people, anything that moved, looking at each other, brooding in their silent solidarity.  She was the prettiest, most refined among them.

 

As I got closer, her friends all took off, scattered away from me, and I wondered if my reputation preceded me for raping, robbing, exiling, and killing off any living thing that I took exception to or that I desired to dominate out of arrogance or hatred.  But she stayed.  And I wanted her to, badly.  Not to hurt her, but to serve as a sign, to be proof that another living thing could sense that I had changed.  I wanted her to know, wanted myself to know that I was no longer like the others of the family of billions I was born into. 

 

As I got closer to her, I thought thoughts of peace, of benignity.  I purposed to exude neutrality and harmlessness, love even.  She eyed me warily, never broke her searing stare.  I allowed the heat of it to burn the badness inside me.  I gave her the gift of gladly taking her thousands of years of fearfulness.  No sounds needed to come from her or me, no touch, no intimate knowing.  I only wanted to be able to walk by her without her moving from that fence.

 

I was almost level with her, just six feet away or so.  My heart was full of hope.  But she couldn’t take it any longer.  At the last minute she flew away from me and joined the others perched and preening their feathers three stories up on the fire escape rail of a dilapidated tenement building.

 

Fini

 

PHOTO CREDIT

 

Tenement building photo snagged from http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/tcn/Research_Reports/60.htm.

 

 

The above was spun off the Sunday Scribblings prompt “#125 – How I met my [fill in blank].”  Click here for more on prompt #125 from other Sunday Scribblings participants.

SS#122 – Do I have to?

 

No one has to do anything.  No one forces us to get out of bed in the morning to go to work.  We might get out of bed and go to work each day because we choose not to live on a park bench in the summer or in a box under a bridge in the winter.  We may choose to go to work because we don’t want our parents or some other significant persons in our lives to think badly of us, that we’re lazy, no-account folks.

 

Maybe some of the choices we make to satisfy one area of our lives conflicts with another area.  Maybe the type of work we’ve chosen to make money so we won’t have to live under a bridge dictates doing things we resent doing.  Maybe the religious order we’ve chosen for a majority of reasons is dictating a few minority things that we just don’t fully agree with, don’t want to do.

 

Whatever it is, it’s always about choices, never about have-tos. 

 

Our lives are huge balls of yarn.  Some of us have the time or the smarts or the skill to keep our balls of yarn tidy.  Many of us, we unwind a few feet of yarn from the ball with the intention to wind it better or tighter, then the phone rings and we have to take some prints over to the warehouse and go over them with the civil engineer and when we get back to the ball, the yarn’s all tangled.  We’ve pulled it with us out to the car and all the way to Apollo and International and back.

 

“No matter,” we say, as we begin working on rewinding the yarn.  Then the boss calls an impromptu meeting, so we stop and rush to conference room C2300 with our Franklin Planners and coffee.  There’s a lot going on in Salt Lake City.  Who would have guessed?  We get assigned to a big project.  We get back to our desk and there’s the ball of yarn a lot smaller now, with more looping, loose yarn than wound yarn.  Now it’s been across town and back, to the conference room and back, and it’s headed for Salt Lake City.  It’s out of hand.

 

I say I don’t like unwound yarn.  I say I didn’t choose it.  But I had to have chosen it.  I don’t see anyone else in here.

 

 

I’ve got my coconuts and I’m ready to ride.  Be back in a month or so.

 

PHOTO CREDITS:

 

Out of pocket films from http://www.outofpocketfilms.com/OutOfPocket_BW.jpg

 

Monty Python “Holy Grail” pic from http://media.canada.com/01135ebc-53cc-4d7b-8172-cbc446f9b580/dumas.jpg

 

 

 

The above is part of Sunday Scribblings prompt “#122 – Do I have to?”  Click here for more on prompt #122 from other Sunday Scribblings participants.