It was the perfect day. I hadn't had a perfect day in sometime. I guess the odds are always against the perfect day to begin with, so you can't really get mad when it doesn't happen. Only when you get the opposing force of the perfect day...the day of reckoning.
We were sitting on the couch as a family watching ALF and laughing. The kids were laughing at the primitive, furry, man filled space alien on the screen. He looked so funny when he tried to run. We were laughing because we cannot believe we thought this was funny once. Once in a different world. The kids are eating popsickles and mom and I are endulging in a Hot and Ready on the couch like viking barbarians. There is a cool breeze blowing on our faces from the window. It is a perfect 75 degrees outside. In the night sky, the moon lights the paths of the drunkards stumbling home from their corner spouses. They make no noise, but watch the beauty of a family realizing that all they really have is each other dancing inside the windows. The screen flashes with electric pictures and the depth of the beauty of family forces us all to close our eyes and feel the flakes fall on our shoulders...our eye lashes. It feels beautiful. We lift out faces to the sky and stick out our tongues to catch the falling cedars...........Cedars? "What is this?" We look up at the blizzard of saw dust falling onto our faces. It's both beautiful and confusing. It sparks at the occasional nail for a moment and continues splitting a line directed between us. Between my family. It begins to darken. The beauty of the dust showering us is now lost and it begins to get in our eyes and fills our stomachs. It is revolting. I makes us cough hysterically as we try to find each other in the darkness. The dust is razors now. It cuts into the very things we never wanted to happen as kids. It drives distance between us and separates us from who we always wanted to be. Our dreams will be the next to fall prey to the cedar snow. Our dreams will be pressed into wooden statues that will be gauked at by artsies and pretend artsies. They will look at our statues and get sad feelings about their parents or their lack thereof. They will buy those statues as symbols of their undying committment to never make committments. Our destruction will become art.
The sawdust flies in our faces and our kids are screaming, but nothing will keep us apart. Nothing will keep our hands from interlocking fingers again. We will join together or die. This is art to us. We stand in a circle holding hands and dancing around as the sawdust falls like a midnight snow all around us. Above us, we know there is a blade coming, but it cannot touch us. It may rain as much as it would like, but it will not separate our fingers from each other's. It's steel will recoil. It will fail. This doll house will fall, but our family will remain. Whoever wishes to bring it down and separate it's parts will walk away unfullfilled. He will walk away with a hot saw, but a heart turned to liquid.
But for now, we just dance in the falling cedar that has not power to stop us.
Sing.
Migrate.
Thanks for reading...Z
