Metaphors In The Drizzle

Steve and I went out for a brunch-like meal Sunday morning then walked in the drizzle at Freedom Park. Getting to the Pancake House was comedic. Nothing was the same, all the familiar landmarks consumed in one of Charlotte's recent paroxysms of gentrification. The old Charlottetown Mall is gone. The little houses in the Cherry neighborhood that once furnished servants for Myers Park have been replaced by cheap looking apartments.

But the Pancake House was nice and the conversation was good.

Either there or later walking in the drizzle at Freedom Park we talked about Steve's notion of how Brenda, the cats and I formed a system. It was/is like a gravitational system where each member contributes his or her attraction to the whole. Remove one body and the rest fly around in confusion as the new arrangement tries to sort itself out. This is especially bad when the sun, the center is removed. This doesn't have anything to do with love. It is much deeper than that.

(Yancie travels a complex orbit between the old system consisting of the cats and me and the new system of her own family - sensitive to disruptions and perturbations in both.)

My metaphor is more biological. Brenda and I were together so long we became connected at the level of emotional DNA. At the end, our spiritual genetics were interwtined. I could finish her sentences, she mine. So when the connection between us was severed I naturally began to hemorrhage psychic stuff. For a while I thought I would bleed out.

Another friend, also a writer and a poet, offered these words...

"Now we are of that age when those who watched us grow are all gone and those we chose to love and move through time with are falling away, one by one, like leaves reluctant to seek unfamiliar ground."