Choice By Chaos

I once stood in the shackled darkness of mysterious place and sound. The smell, like the rancid aftermath of too many days lost in a bottle.

We christened each morning with ugly thoughts of yesterday, clinging to the hope that the bed might rot out beneath us and plunge us into some happy place. Cobwebs wove themselves while spiders lay in wait.

With only one, there are many. For the sides of that which we choose, and that which we do not, fragment like the shattered glass in an antique house.

 I don’t forget, but forgetting seems easier than trying to hold on.

We like to say we had no choice, but the truth is we did and do and will. 

Choices are like clouds that skate in the sky…once focused on, they form shapes and movements with ease. But if they are left up there with no notice, they simply float by, one after the other with no direction, eventually to dissipate.

I married chaos. With an “I do” to shame the angels on either shoulder, together we adopted faces and names and recorded our drama on the big screen in the sky. What he said she said they said, we did. Because, what we did they said he was, they should. But they didn’t, see, who did? If we don’t know, we fill in the blanks with supposition, propositioning the probabilities and potentialities of what she said they would, he might have. The rot becomes our four walls, and toes dance on the edges of our falling floors. I do.

What I don’t know, is when the picture became quite as clear as it is. Perhaps it was the day that the period ended not a sentence, not a paragraph; but a chapter at the closing of a novel. The period, only a dot, and maybe not even noticed more than a hair out of place, was actually the snapping slam of an entire story made from doubt.

Before that, who I was only dangled on the cobweb of defining moments. I transformed from the trapped fly to the nimble spider. I chose to weave my reality instead of tremble in wait to be consumed by it. 

But that was just a rain drop, and perhaps not even a big one.

Spiders are still brutally tiny in this great big universe. The construction of reality is very reliant on where she chooses to hang it and how she chooses to weave the webs that sustains her. If she could tell you just one thing, it would be that there are so many places in this world with teeth, some choices are like picking the best rotten apple.

Yet the process of divorcing bad decisions is a long and tedious one. I could say battles are won, but like those won in a courtroom they end with a clunk of a gavel and an all-rise. Perhaps the debate to settle without prejudice is chewed on by lawyers, with briefcases and twitchy-stressed out eyes. The starch of their tailored suits leaking into the very pores they sweat from and smearing it across the contract you’re trying to read. Their sighs are deafening and logic crippling.

And you want to just let it all go. Climb into the ocean and discover Atlantis….because down there you might be able to breathe so much better. 

But I didn’t, I didn’t let go…not right away any way. I stayed married to the fringes, trying to convince myself that I could not only change my reality, but maybe those around me as well. Couldn’t they see the rotting mire of what we were creating? Couldn’t they feel the presence of the stalking carnivore, ready to devour the whipped flesh of all we were trying to make? It doesn’t get any better.

Until the water.

As a Pisces, my sign being only the stars that chose to hang on the day of my arrival, is two fish chasing their tales. Forever dancing in a cosmic joke of balance and imbalance. Locked, perpetually in indecision and confusion. Seeing both the good and the bad as a juggling act, put on by yours truly. Out of water, we die. The air is just too much to take in sometimes. Yet in water, we flourish and grow.

I chose to stop denying what is. I chose to sign the paper and divorce that ridiculous story. I chose to find Atlantis. I chose to weave my web in a concrete corner, fending off bats with a barbed-wire heart. What’s more, I realized that I didn’t have to leave behind my loved ones…but I also couldn’t choose for them. Not letting them go, but letting them be.....

I see life as a series of metaphors, painted on the walls of rotting houses while the vibrant, thriving weeds choke it out. We don’t have to see it to know it’s there. What we create, crumbles like a sand-castle under the will of what we cannot control. Leaves, upon the surface of a mirror lake.

It can be beautiful, this thing called life. It can be joyful and peaceful and exquisite….. if we choose.