The Saddest Pretty Thing I Can Do
I remember a long time ago when I was where you wanted to be, and you were where I wanted to be. We ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of where you want to be. We tasted and knew that it was good. This was knowledge. It was the knowing of a thing, and we knew it. We knew where we wanted to be.
But now I wonder if time and children and work and money and worry have made us hard.
On the outside.
And I wonder if we still know where we want to be.
I wonder if this knowledge has gotten lost somewhere along the way, like a precious ring that a little girl lost while playing in her secret place under the bushes. She cried, and she looked, and it should have been right there in the dirt, but it wasn't. It was lost, and thirty-five years later she still thinks about that little ring and wonders where it might be.
The ring was right in front of her but just out of her reach. Maybe it slipped between her fingers as she dragged them frantically through the dirt. Maybe it took a bad hop and was just a few inches beyond belief, hiding under a leaf or behind a twig. As her energy for searching withered, her grief for losing grew until finally she gave up and took her sadness home.
Over the years the ring sunk slowly into the earth until now it lives among the roots and the stones, beyond all hope of being found.
The saddest things are the ones that can be forever lost but never forgotten, like precious rings and love and faith and innocence and play.
You are where I want to be. Am I where you want to be?
Become a girl again and meet this boy under the bushes. Let us find what has been lost. For yours are still the brown eyes for my blue. And mine are still the only fingers that know the secret way to hold your hand and your heart. And ours are the bodies that knew one another and brought three sisters into this world.
You are where I want to be. Am I where you want to be?
I am waiting and wanting. I do not want to sink down to the place where the roots are. I do not want to be somewhere where I can never be found.
rlp
I’m proud to announce that Turtles All The Way Down came out in November of 2009. This was my first experience with the Consafo model of social media community publishing.
2000 copies were printed. We sold well over 500 as advance purchases or in the weeks leading up to Christmas. This paid for the printing costs completely.