Let me tell you a story now the moment has passed; now it’s been cast to memory where it will remain and change and grow stranger and wilder as the years pass, to become a myth, an allegory, of how all things, all things in nature fade:
there was a man so fraught with grief, for his love had left him, so he had left her, and each day he took his lonely animal body down to the river or the woods to pray, to be overwhelmed by nature’s embrace
and one particular day, the last of the autumn warmth now gone and the sky overcast as his mind was, he was so overcome with longing that he flung himself into the river, clothes and all — perhaps he just wanted to feel something bigger than his grief, or perhaps the river herself pulled him to get a taste of that human pain and then lick him clean — but threw himself in, clothes and all, he did,
Hat and all
a woolen hat knitted by his love, right next to him on the couch or at the dinner table, in bed listening to him read to her — imperfect in parts, just like her — it would soothe her restlessness and so it would soothe him — and eventually she cast it off her needles, put it on his head and pulled it over his ears, and did so day by day until her creation was fit perfectly to his crown — he wore it every day as her spring turned to summer, and his autumn turned to winter —
but the river that day was hungry for more than just his sadness — or perhaps the river knew exactly what he needed — a symbolic relinquishing of some precious piece of matter that her fingers had fondled, her hands had laboured over for weeks — so when he dragged his sopping body out of the river, the hat was no longer on his head — and so he paced up and down the banks like a wild man, heavy in his hurt, wailing for that one thing that was gone now and would not return.
Three days passed, an eternity. On the other side of the world, on her home lands, a woman places a ring on her right ring finger, made of cow bone, carved over weeks with precision and intuition by her love to express his longing and his love for her while she was away from him — it was not “that kind of ring”, he’d said, but something precursory perhaps, and they had both hoped it would one day turn to gold —
and when things had started to fall apart, she’d taken the ring off without realizing, and placed it in a wooden bowl, and as the week of bardo passed, and her rage softened to sadness and opened into love, and the last song had been sung, she put the ring back on her finger in celebration of all that had been and could no longer be.
Later that day, wearing the ring, standing in a circle of others and dropping down into her naturalness, into the wisdom of the body, eyes closed, bare feet on the wooden floor, something primal rose from the depths of her, something bigger than her body could contain, and she flailed, and she screamed, and her back spasmed and she beat her palms and fists and feet on the floor until they bruised, and no one dared to stop her because they knew that her body should not hold this any longer — and her wailing turned to laughter and back again, vacillating between the two until the line was blurred and they became the same thing — the tragicomedy of life on earth —
exhausted, covered in snot and hair stuck to her face, she dragged herself to the edge of the room and curled onto a cushion — looked at her aching hands to inspect for broken bones — to see no ring — looked around for some moments until a beloved flame-haired sister crawled over and held up to her, between two fingers,
a broken bone, half a ring —
the witch said nothing in her wisdom, handed it over, and left — and with the half ring in her hand, the woman sobbed the last good tears she’d been holding, put the ring on the altar, could not even curse that she had put the ring back on only to break it — for of course she had — this was what was needed — this was what had arisen from the earth of her body once her cloying mind had been sent to the library — she had watched this ring change colour over seasons, she had watched the hairline cracks appear as it aged with her — but not wanting to read between the lines, wanting all good things to be preserved, wanting creation to be eternal, wanting some things to not belong to nature, some things to be above nature’s laws —
But the only things that are outside nature’s laws do not need our protection, cannot be grieved.
The next day, even the half-ring had gone: with nothing to hold on to, she felt the clouds part over her heart, and smiled a true smile. She reached out for a man across the world and could not feel his form as she had always been able to. But even at that she smiled, and somehow knew that he was smiling too.
So the story ends: with two years, three days and a whole planet between them, a man and a woman learn from the good earth that all form is temporary, to see that what is left that can never be broken or swept away.
And a new story begins.
