Things are good, don’t jump anywhere based on that title. I’m ok, doing fine, and had a nice visit with my Auntie Karen this past weekend. She stated a couple times how relieved she was to see me with her own two eyes (identical to mine!) and to see that I was, in fact, doing ok. Making it through this crazy thing called … life (thanks Prince). Here’s my Monday Mixed Metaphor for ya.
Sometimes, when we have periods or eras or just plain ol’ chunks of times in our lives that are filled with unhappiness and pain, we find once we extract ourselves from the moment, we are quite content to sit on the bank, rest among the mint and the jewel weed, and barely keep our toes in the water. The visual in my head is the creek I played in while growing up, the water that came around the bend and pooled, filled with trout & crawdads, a tree hanging over shading the water – water so still on the surface but ever-constant in its flow, sluicing over the rocks we piled for a crossing. Even though the water is moving, stasis exists on the bottom. And when we re-enter the pool, and we feel the movement, the water pooling around our legs, our feet disappear. Rocks shift, adjusting to our weight. The moss and dirt that has settled, undisturbed until now, is pushed out of place and muddies the clearness. No matter how strong we are, how firm the ground feels under our feet – even in the riverbed – it takes a moment, or four, to regain clarity.
That’s how I feel right now, my memories and emotions have been stirred, it is to be expected, and while the mud between my toes no longer pulls at me like a quicksand, it is both familiar and foreign, and like the mud, I am vaguely unsettled. Small bubbles rise, and I wade back to the bank, to peruse the water and the slightly disturbed creek bed.
Last night as I waited for sleep to come, I thought about all of this swirling as a drink, one part sadness, two parts memories, shaken or stirred, a rim of sugar & salt together, the juice of something equally tart and sweet, and I kept coming back to one ingredient that simply can’t be incorporated: bitters.
Ah, the bitters. They do like to come out of the cabinet, and they ache to be a part of this cocktail, the Melancholia, even if only by rinsing the shaker with a half-jigger. Sometimes I don’t succeed, and sometimes I even have a liberal hand with the bottle. But I know as the metaphor goes, they are best left corked.
