The unbelievable thing is that we were actually ready for it. Folded and re-folded like cloth napkins, the lion reaches out from under the table and onto our laps again. Eyes all innocence, far from predation, lax unlike a lion is in the accidental domesticity of a casual dining room. The creature simply paws up from under the table like it’s a perfectly usual event, like lions live in houses ever, like other people’s mothers have ever given the OK to house zoo animals when their young-adult children are evicted from their section 8 apartment homes due to credit card fraud and on the brink of losing their jobs unless they you know DO something with a capital D. Do something to impress your unusual value upon your employer, like nurse and domesticate an African lion in the relative comfort of your childhood suburban home. And while this sounds crazy, it’s not something we were wholly unprepared for. We have a long history of lion taming in this family, and an even longer history of shared animal glances between the two of us.
The thing about a lion is that it begets a lot of attention due to being more than your usual house-cat. Regal as all hell, most of what you might normally think about pales in comparison to the majesty of this rapidly growing creature. And when you try to ignore it it’s there. It’s there in the way that you don’t want things to be, because not only is it there, it’s the MOST there, that perpetual elephant snoozing in the corner whom you’ve tried to ignore in vain. Only this time it’s not the metaphor, it’s the real thing, and it’s not an elephant at all but a lion like I said. And looking back, you can’t quite remember which part about this was the great idea, and which part of this would lead to our metaphorical and also actual demise, mostly due to our constant proximity to sharp teeth. Yet the beauty of fur cannot be denied.
In reality this should all make perfect sense to you, given our long history of lion taming. The fact that we are even having this conversation at this point in time, despite the fact that I am initiating it, seems to me to be symptomatic of a larger iceberg of vaguely relevant problems and questions that have yet to melt. Droplets of “what if’s” and silvery morning dew off a plant leaf collecting in crystal puddles that we gaze into and see our future or whatnot. Because any and all of this pales in comparison to the comparison I’ve drawn between your past and my present: that is to say, DONE, hurt, cast aside. You left me here three years ago and it worked; you proved your point. I always knew that living in the basement was not my destiny, but nothing proved my stagnancy more than when you walked out the door that day with a bag in your hand and a dream in your heart. The only thing that hurt was that it was a dream we shared, and yet you took it all with you that day; took it on your own. I never thought you would do it alone.
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They say all great heroes set out for their adventures in solitude, and that’s exactly what you did. But before that there was “us;” there was the team; the duo; and I still assume that that meant something to you. Never will a day be more crystal clear than that day we roamed through the woods, and found what no one else would ever believe. The magic of the moment lay in the fact that we seemed to own those woods. And the green surrounded us like crystal bells, and the pine needles stuck sharp and pine-y into my sides as we hustled through the rapidly choking forest. We were young that day and your head was cold because you’d forgotten a hat.
