Fine. Ish.

My friend, the one I wrote with on Tuesday (or was it Thursday?) mornings in Maine - every week - or maybe only sometimes, every other week or so  for a couple of years or was it only months? Sitting at her table or mine listening to Baroque music (always Baroque, I had to buy Baroque music online so I’d have it so that we could write listening to it) - And listening to the birds and drinking tea and secretly, indulgently delving into each other’s lives in a way school parking lots never allowed, she wants to know if I’m okay.

She says judging from my blog posts, it’s a little hard to tell. I need to get back to her, so I think I’ll tell her that I’m fine ish. Which is a lie. I’m far better than fine ish. There are things. When have there ever not been things? And the things are sometimes large ish and sometimes small ish and sometimes minute. Most often they are imaginary. 

I am afraid of new things now, like you’d expect, pretty much. The kid who is afraid to climb the jungle gym starts to climb. She gets to the third rung and does not look down, because looking up by then has become automatic and a game  and she knows where to put her hands, and she likes the feeling they make when her fingers curl around the cool steel, and her feet feel solid underneath her, the rounded steel flattened to a ladder under her foot,  and she knows exactly where she is going and she is over- coming and she is triumphant and she is up up up up. Until she is up. There are no more rungs. If she reaches up her hand, there is nothing to grab. She feels suddenly unsolid. Movement had been its own form of balance, she thinks. (later she will learn that movement was as poor a substitute as milk is for honey. But never mind.  She is at the top of the jungle gym. Her family is healthy and she loves them and she feels blessed and she feels grateful and she feels unbalanced.

She never really wanted to climb the jungle gym. She had been afraid, but she also just hadn’t seen the point.  It isn’t actually very high. She’d preferred the swings but there was a line up and she was always tempted to jump off right as the swing reached the tip of its arc, never to swing back in full.  Never to pump until the chain chinked and jolted and made her heart race.

But she is fiendish. Better than fine. She can see the whole playground now. She knows how to climb up and she will figure out how to get down. You can tell because she’s sitting still already.

(For Libby)