Winner takes all

While the wind rages, and the fence just hangs by whatever fixed it into position in the first place, the plants and ornaments in the garden are chastised by the wind just enough not to destroy them quite yet. If that fence were the wall of your house, you would be in dire straits, it’s true. It’s only the fence though. It’s allowed to dance and wiggle like that.

While the rain lashes, filling the basin you insist on calling ‘the pond’, only just faster than it takes to leak out again - somewhere in the base of it, underground - you watch the wee mouse battling across the pebbles on the patio, desperate to reach the shelter of the border. Ah, he’s made it. Good.

While the clouds scurry past and the awning flaps and the trees sway and the guttering overflows, you keep staring out through the slats of the blind, too apathetic to lift it for a clear view. It’s not new what you’re looking out at but it will never look the same again. It is familiar territory, and yet, uncharted.

How can that be? How can this… be?

How can you be grand one day and oh, way less than grand the next? How can you be worry-free yesterday and positively laden with woes today? At least, that’s how it feels. How do you wrap your head around… this? Whether or not things ever go back to being ‘grand’ is very much an unknown. And it’s the unknown that is freaking me the fuck out. How are we going to get through this? What’s in store? Nothing nice, nothing to look forward to… nothing not worrisome.

Instead of just trundling along, living our lives, passing time, fighting, making up, laughing, lazing, planning, worrying about things not worth the headroom, sharing, well, it’s all just like, stopped. Everything is focussed on this. Everything has to be. Everything is… this. The researching, the reading, the extra freaking out. The pretending it’s okay, the regrouping, the questioning. The what-ifs, the now whats, the did yous, the have you seens, the why didn’ts.

So, knowing, that if you stood like, say, on a hill overlooking a town, somewhere, anywhere, that life would just be going on for everyone there as it always has done, you watch through the window at the wild weather. Like it’s a metaphor for what’s going on in your head right now. It couldn’t possibly be sunny and warm right now. It would not fit. And too, the lives of those around do not come to a standstill because yours does. We all know this. Well, I suppose some lives do, but only coincidentally. Not like ‘because of’. Not like in solidarity. Basically, life goes on, so ours will too. It will. Apparently, you have to take hurdles whether you want to or not. They are there to be taken, not sidestepped, not ignored. They need tackled, even if you knock the bastards over as you go and keep running right to the tape (just to keep the analogy going). The tape’s the goal.

We’re aiming for the tape.