don’t look

The other morning, as we wound our way through the mountains approaching the resort, I really tried to ignore them — those looming imperial things. Maybe that sounds strange. I suppose it is strange, but they were so beautiful, so green, so full and alive, they literally made me ache. They reminded me of the Northwest, gave me flashbacks of an easier life, of simpler times. So I tried — with all my might — to ignore them. I told MB, “It’s like someone has put the cutest puppy in the world in my lap, telling me he could be mine, and I’m waiting for the catch. I’m holding my breath. I must stay objective about the puppy.”

So that became our catchphrase as we twined past the towering seduction of those mountains: “Don’t look at the puppy. Don’t look at the puppy.”

They were speaking to me, those mountains, luring me, calling me, and I didn’t want to be swept away. Keep your wits about you, Trace. I felt a little undone by it all, knowing as I do that the landscape surrounding me at that moment precisely matches the landscape of my own heart. Somehow, I understand it and feel it understands me. If you can feel a kinship with a landscape, then I do, I truly do. It lies dormant and quiet inside me much of the time because I don’t live in that now, but deep in that greenery, covered in mountains, I could suddenly feel the rumblings and stirrings of that sleeping giant inside me and the rumblings actually hurt. Oh, they hurt. I felt too small and too weak to contain them all: Uh-oh. He’s waking up. He’s waking up. Shhh ….. shhhhhh …. it’s okay … go back to sleep …. back to sleep.

“Don’t look at the puppy. Don’t look at the puppy.”

Life does things to you that you never ever imagine it will. Things happen that make it hard to believe in the possibility of good things anymore. That’s it; that’s the cold steel rod that runs through your core: the death of possibility. You start to live in this suspended state inside, not turning here, not turning there, just dangling, noncommital, practicing an apathy you don’t really feel, but hope to feel because maybe apathy is the answer. Maybe it’s the thing that will protect you from disappointment because the slow burn of regular disappointment feels as if it must be worse than death. Sometimes you think you’d rather die than be disappointed just one more time. You wonder, you worry, When will that final drop fall that starts the deadly flood?

“Don’t look at the puppy. Don’t look at the puppy.”

“Whatever you do, do not look at the puppy.”