To every parent a nightmare, as irrational as it is compelling. Mine for Katherine: that she will leap a storm drain, the dark rectangle beneath city corners. She will not see the slope. She will slide inside.
She will fall, maybe forever, into dark. I will lose her. I will try desperately to gain the inside, but my body cannot go where children slide. I will lose her.
Crazy, I know: she also would not fit into that opening. Yet I grasp her hand tightly every time she jumps that mouth. Every time she leaps I think of what the earth might swallow, and how I might lose her, and the impotence of love.
2 comments:
No, that's genuinely scary. Two weeks before Christmas there'd been heavy rain, and I slipped, carrying the guitar I'd just bought for J, so that my foot started entering that black hole under the footpath, still rushing with water. I'm way too big to be in any danger of actually falling in (and you know, even petite K probably is too), but I felt the horror of the abyss, for sure. The guitar, in its case, was fine, though I had a number of bruises and a sprained finger for my trouble.
That is frightening.
The strange thing about the storm drain phobia is that it isn't based on experience or trauma or anything remotely related to reality. It's an impossible thing, yet it does have a grip.
Post a Comment