Archetypal Fiction We notice the hole they left. Now their importance if not their meaning is plain. They were to nourish a child into the far side of potential, not because they’re saviors but because no child should ever need saving. Now the child is a mother who understands some children need saving because their parents are still children. In this child-mother’s dreams, a couple are always smiling at her on the other side of waking. But when she wakes no one is humming, or baking a cake, or warming soup, or pouring milk. But she is expected to do such things and more because another child is staring at her with wide eyes through the bars of her corner crib. When the mother opens the cup -board, she sees the same emptiness she saw in her childhood after she’d outgrown her crib. No one warned her if she weren’t careful she would continue a certain pattern. No one cautioned against playing over sidewalk cracks as if they would never widen when you weren’t looking, then swallow you up Doesn’t history reveal that every inch of our planet bears a history of earthquakes? Doesn’t history reveal the nature of “saving grace” as compromise despite their elevation by fictionists into false divinity?
Mortality’s Mid-Life Crisis There seems no special reason why that light should be focused on love. We’re past the age of boozing, drinking and drugging as if we always will be slim, fresh-faced and smiling We’re no different from the Ross Ice Shelf (and the rest of Antarctica) as the planet warms around it. Faced with mortality gazing back at us from the bathroom mirror, we measure the slackness of fat belted around our “true” waistline. Faced with climate change, scientists measure ice thickness and the shape of the sea floor to gauge the frozen shelf’s vulnerability to collapse. Once, you whispered, “You are my planet.” What was a room dim with the edges of night suddenly flared into a sunlit space bright as noon. We could not have known a moment such as that would be the tip of an economist’s curve graphing the “marginal rate of return”—that from such a peak begins a descent where redemption breaks through the implied trajectory only if love surfaces allowing us once more to behave with innocence Thus, where illumination is generous enough to rise, let it: reveal love with its infinite possibilities despite the body’s deterioration, ours and earth
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