People I trust my life with
The rivers had been my place once; they tumbled through the Cascade Mountains and carved through deserts of slick rock and sand. But I hung up my paddles over a year before, moved myself to a city next to a river, saying water is water as I flew toward the other coast. I traded my life jacket for a cashmere blended pea coat and a door with three bolt locks on it, told myself that one life story was as good as the next. I went to graduate school, which my friend told me is all about people talking around the edges, but nothing in the center.
I thought if I went to enough art museums and unrated French movies I’d stop thinking about the sounds the mountains make, although the next moment the illusion fades, and I am just looking at the big city that never in my lifetime will be dark enough to see the stars.
I’d heard too that city men were different, that I might find one who has an accent, who read books and cooks with spices and didn’t save all his passion for class-five rapids and 5.12 climbs. What I found when I got there was the same man with different excuses, enough dispassion toward everything but his work to bring me to my knees.
I learned one day too that Monarch butterflies make blue jays throw up. That’s how Monarch butterflies keep from being eaten. The process is actually called Batesian mimicry, several other butterfly species have learned how to color themselves to look like a monarch every time a blue jay comes around. The problem arises when a blue jays experience is with an imposter butterfly. If the blue jay doesn’t throw up that first time, he will spend the rest of his life not knowing which are the safe butterflies and which are the ones that make him sick.
I’m beginning to realize my experiences with the imposters have lead me to not ever learn which ones make me sick and which ones are safe; if there are any.
See, I’ve made things up in my life and believed them. I thought love was like that, too, that you could frame it like a photograph, according to your needs. It’s the very same part of me that knows that for every positive image there is a pure and perfect negative on the other side.
Then there’s the whole other story about learning to believe in the things that had been there all along. It is no different from believing in the sunset, really; the translation of object to offering, a simple matter of faith. It is belief that is a firework: precarious, marvelous, momentary, and bright. There’s a time in our life, I hope, when all the ups and downs start to look like a straight line and the straight line starts to look like an adventure and that maybe, just maybe the lucky part hasn’t started just yet or perhaps the luck has been there all along, the tragedy is we never see it.
I am here, I keep telling myself, as an experiment. I have come to get away for a while from the sharp edges of the continent, to see if maybe I am done with edges generally. People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred million layers of cellophane, tearing one layover off at a time, trying to get down to me.