2000 Monkeys
probably wrote this

unlikely
xeniot 1999-12-03
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copyright xeniot
(monkey #101)
1998 - 2001



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Unlikely

The world slid under me today, its grave fingers reaching toward me even at 33,000 feet, pulling me into a chair in a plane that balanced itself on nothing but tiny molecules of air as clear and insubstantial as the pane of glass in my window, twelve stories above the street. I can look across the street into a corner office at a desk and a leather chair.

I watched the ground move by (and it is moving, but far faster than it seems, even from 33,000 feet. In fact it is flinging itself around the sun in an endless tango move--whose name I have forgotten but not the feel) and it carried with it houses and trees and long, winding roads and ski trails in the snow hugging the lee of a mountain. They seemed so valuable down there, so beautiful in the way all tiny things are beautiful, yet not so beautiful as the sight of Portland coming down from the rain clouds, its streets like mirror-threads spun around the city from light to light, holding it up from the ground in some intangible way.

To the list of gifts we must add the sound of landing, and the sound of taking off. How strange it would be to land on Mars and see the Earth, all of it, as bright as Venus and a deep, clouded blue. To wake with another planet beneath me...because then I could come back to this planet and have it be new as well, to go speeding past the moon, using its gravity as a brake, and to see Mars in the sky again, to feel the hands of Earth again--this time, perhaps, a sister.

God, grant us the desires of our heart. Give us desire for you; give us new desires and better desires; give us desires that will scale the ramparts of heaven and that will let us love fully and fiercely. Do not let us be satisfied with dim images. Do not give me false dreams of power or fame or wealth but show me what it is I really seek. Seek ye first the kingdom of God: forgive us, Father, for we have lost our maps. I have lost my map, and so I will pick that mountain that seems so beautiful from here and walk towards it. I will follow that woman, so, so beautiful I cant explain it. What else am I supposed to do? You tell us how to walk and how to fight and how to treat strangers on the road and how to be fearless, but there is no map there, only Find out what God likes, so I am still looking.

I am looking in unlikely places: uncertainty, danger, and defeat. Maybe I want to take on the pain of the world. Maybe I want to understand it. maybe the lessons of such things are worth their trouble, like love is worth a hundred disappointments...

But I have decided that I want her, even if it means being happy. Even if it means settling down and never feeling this ache (my perpetual hunger...my demons of unlikelihood) again. Of course, she will not be happiness, any more than she will be disaster or uncertainty. Only she will bring it as she brings herself. And it is her I want, not anything else that I might get from her. Except perhaps that glimpse of the Increate that hides behind her smile and the way she sees the world.

(San Francisco)