Two pictures.
That’s what I have in my head. Two impossibly opposite
pictures that I can’t fit together no matter how hard I try. One is sharp and
clear, an ideal sketched by thousands of other tiny memories and drawn together
by time. The other is foggy and dim, a recent, darkened image that slides away
into the edges of my mind when I try to bring it into focus.
The first is a little boy with brown eyes and a wide smile. A
ready laugh. He can’t say his Rs. Sometimes he carries a plastic lightsaber.
The second—but there it goes. Slinking off again, too
horrible to be real. But oh, God. It is.
I keep calling them back, trying to overlay them somehow,
because I know I have to. It’s “real life” in all its ugly, all its dreadful
heartbreak, and no amount of ignorance is going to change the reality of this
world.
And yet.
If this is real life, then so is a phone ringing and
answered from miles away: a hand stretched out and grasped tight. So are arms
that open and wrap and hold. And this reality repels the other again and again
like the two poles of a magnet, just like those pictures in my mind, and I
know that when it is finished, it won’t be the darkness that gets the final
word.
