A Return To Innocence

A Pang of Loss

Candid Corvid Productions

As I snugged squinchy hair ties onto a bottle to keep them restrained, one straight black one kept slipping off to my irritation.

Then I realized that I could give it to our tiger – and that he would love to have a fresh one to play with.

But then I remembered, he is no longer here with us, alive, for about a month now.

We called him “squinch” as one of his nicknames because he would love to slide his body sideways along the floor, dragging forward by claws in catpet in sideways scooching, when he was being “naughty.”

Then, he would look up at us with playful, half-lidded eyes and flip around with his tail twitching as he meowed for us to scritch-pet and praise him for his being so funny.

Altered States

The Great Confession

Candid Corvid Productions

“I filled your life with madness. Playing phone recordings over and over. Seeking the thrills. The extra relationships. The secret appointments. None of this that you knew, while you kept showing up trying to be here for me.”

He gestured to the bedroom where they could sit more comfortably. How she just wanted – needed him to get to the punchline. Being quiet so that he could get it all out and she would finally hear the truth was agonizing.

She felt pretty sure where his confession was leading. She had felt his distance, avoidance, and rejection of her all these years – but had also known that he needed what she had been providing.

Other people would have left him to himself to sort out the mess of his life out on his own.

She wasn’t “other people.” She was the exception.

And she had wanted to provide him with better options – even though hanging onto him in the hopes he would return to who he had been had been a huge expenditure in unreturned love, time, and constricted living.

You do this for a loved one who is hurt and damaged if you truly care. You create an environment within which hopefully they can repair.

But this can put you in the position of being projected upon as a caregiver, an authority figure – someone that is resented when dealimg with a mind almost completely broken.

The once vast inner strength she had poured out to stay here for him for so long was dwindling. The denied deficit within her was screaming as she felt with almost certainty that someone else had won him.

But she was expected to listen. He needed this confession for his own resolution.

She had become a martyr against her best intentions. The scenario had been a setup to crucify her from the start.

Sometimes love is not returned nor redeemed when you have worked so hard to earn and deserve it.

The gift of love’s clemency is a mysterious art.

January 20, 2023

Male Bonding

The White Buck

Candid Corvid Productions

A young man with curly hair and a gorgeous just-then-unshirted and perfectly sculpted, cream-colored upper torso poised solid and proud above white sweat pants nonchalantly slid smoothly into his car in front of me as he cast a quick look around to see if anyone noticed.

As my eyeballs tried to pop out of their sockets, I laughed out loud and had to walk up to his driver’s side window and tap on it.

As he rolled the glass down slightly self consciously, I joked with a huge grin,” You’re gonna cause an accident doing that!”

He laughed, nodding and acknowledging slightly bashfully, saying,  “Thank you…thank you…” accepting the obvious compliment with its playful admonishment.

Whereupon, I turned away laughing even more and carefully made my way back to my car, determined to keep my eyes off of him.