Medium Delirium

I’m sitting at the dining table waiting for my baby to finish crying and drift off to sleep for her nap. I’ve got a half-eaten plate of fruits and Bon Iver playing in the background and as I scroll listlessly through Instagram I happen upon a comic about being in the car with a parent through the years, a short but wrenching comic about love and loss and dreams and sacrifice and the stupid things we do when we don’t know what to do with the unnameable feelings that knock around inside us like mints in a box. And the next thing I know I’m sobbing and my face is drenched with tears and oh? The baby’s stopp ed crying.

The sadness got me thinking again about an idea and image that’s been brewing inside of me – that love is a fearful little thing. I think we tend to think about love as a gushing river, wide and full and honest and true, but increasingly I feel like love is less like the waters and more like the little fish that gather in the still, silty little pools by the shore, frightened and flighty and powerless against the torrents beyond. It’s fear of losing them that makes me lash out at my parents when they make questionable life choices or don’t take enough care of themselves. It’s the terror when I zoom in on the baby monitor and think I don’t see her breathing. The fist tightening around my heart when I see my husband shut off because I’m being careless with the mints in my box, laying brick after invisible brick till his fortress is impregnable.

The little fish, I keep seeing them in my mind. They are a boring brown and have anxious, doleful eyes and little fins that flap relentlessly to stay in the same spot. When did love and fear become two sides of the same coin? Perhaps it has always been the case and I just never looked carefully enough at the coins when I had to pay up.