Choice
Snow. It is the recurring theme of my life, coming at those times when it’s most critical, providing a pale backdrop and lethal challenge to the pattern, and I battle with it when it is expected and surprising in equal measure.
I feel sometimes that it comes in order to mark the critical moments, the birth of my children, the death of my good friends. I am no more in control of it than a bird controls the wind; I can ride upon it, but I am ultimately at its mercy and naught that I do will ameliorate its icy blast should displease the great force controlling it, if there is any such.
My beloved would say that Gaia controls it, and that Mother Earth sends what will challenge us and sustain us, though we know it not. My own view is that any such entity is definitely of the mind of the trickster, and that trickster took my daughter and placed her in another existence, a sliver of reality away, where I shall not know her, or see her smiling face.
I know she smiles, for how could she not, raised in the early years of full faith and empathy, before I became hardened to the world, my cynicism drawn about me like a coat of stone. I was joy and laughter and knew little of the world, in my play and my creative bliss I was besotted by my beloved and my beloved could do no wrong. So, my sweet Julia, I know it would have been her name, you have been with the me that painted and wrote, and eschewed the growing technologies that trap us all into dark dialogues, passing judgement on strangers and knowing all the world’s darkness and the depth of its depravity.
Not knowing such things, I was happy with my little girl, and the dollies tea parties and painting and the Lego and changing a wheel on a windy mountain side, because we were flying kites.
We fly kites even now my princess, all these years later, when you come home from university, and bring your boy, and I look at him and wonder if he knows you as I do. And, of course, he could not, but I do not know you as he does, or any of your friends, for you are a different creature now, and those days of being my little princess are gone, but not forgotten. Now you pull the great sails we fly, jumping from the ground in great gusts of wind, and wrestle the thin canvas down again, stomping footprints in the whiteness. I know, the other me, that I have not lost you, that you have grown and departed, but I am always in your heart as you are in mine.
How I envy that other me even as I see their joy, their bliss, for I shall not know it, though I have children of my own now, she was the first, snatched away by circumstance, judgement, a desire to raise you better, better than our circumstances would allow.
I miss you my darling, though I love my children with all my heart, and I begrudge them not one jot of that, there is always more room in me to love you and I always shall, separated as we are, by one thin sliver of choice, the width of a snowflake, and as lasting as a lifetime of regret.
I’ve deliberately left a gap before the commentary below.
Look, this is, from my point of a view, a personal and powerful tale, if it could be called a tale at all. It is not a stance, it is a creative piece, and isn’t presenting any argument one way or the other “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” those are poorly chosen terms that have inherent prejudices in them.
I do believe, profoundly, in a woman’s right to choose, I don’t have to like the prospect of that choice. These things are in conflict, but this story isn’t about that, it about feelings and doubts, so I’m not really interested in getting into any sort of argument about it and I won’t pass any comments that instigate one. I’m only interested in creative feedback on the writing, if at all.
Published December 2017