For fifteen years, I held onto a tangled mess of extremely fine gold chain with two pendants dangling from them. Knots upon knots upon… well… tangles… Tonight, I sat down and extracted one from the other, only to discover three chains in the mess. Where is the third pendant? Was there ever one? Does it matter?
Every few years or so, I would come upon this tangle of gold and think, “I really should try to untangle this mess.” Of course, such a task is daunting to say the very least. Surely, it would’ve been easier to simply pull out my wire cutters, destory the chains and buy new ones. When have you ever known me to choose the easy way out of a problem? So, I spent hours untangling. As I did, I felt as if I were untangling my whole life from the time I received the first pendant to now. Both pendants were gifts from my parents when I was a Lady In Waiting for the Krewe of Carollton, two years in a row. I guess I was 11 or 12 the first year.
As I was untangling, I wondered why I had never approached the task with so much determination before. It soon became clear that the needle nose pliers and bent nose pliers I was now using were far better tools than I ever had in the past to which to approach this task. Funny how I feel like in so many ways I’ve got tools I never had before with which to approach examining my life. I sat untangling this mind-numbing tedium with the fierce determination supplied only by years of need to accomplish such a simple and small goal.
I remembered the feel of the air through the window on winter nights in the apartment I conceived Z. The heat supplied by the gas heater even on low was so much as to induce a sweat even in cold-natured little me. The bed against the window supplied me with just the right amount of relief. Einstein would crawl out onto the ledge during the night and watch the street below.
I remember the play-pen bedroom I ran away from. The vertical bars of the wallpaper keeping me trapped like a child. And the freedom of the glitter on the ceiling of my dormroom. Laying in the orange light watching all the colors drift me into another world. A world so much safer, so much lighter.
I remember walking on the levee… As I untangled my mess, the levee became time-trancencing. It was then; it is now. I could see me walking along it on a summer afternoon, sneaking behind it on a winter night, strolling along it just a month or so ago. The river, in it’s cycles, is never changing, but constantly different - never forgiving. It was not meant to forgive, it was meant to flow, to keep moving. That is what we do, we keep moving. Only, I can forgive me. I can learn from my past and grow. I can untangle my own knots and seperate my Comedy and Tragedy from my Blue Topaz. My Carnival from my Life.
The only thing that remains is… an empty chain. What I fill it with is my choice…
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