There's a little black squid. He doesn't have a name. He's the worst parts of me, or at least I've always felt. When I'm challenged, when he's challenged, when we make the impulsive decision that our only option is to fight, he flings his legs out and grips onto anything to keep his footing, wedging himself into whatever crevice he's found shelter in. I do the same. In conversation, I grip onto things, details about people's lives. It's always felt horrific, horrendous. I'd grab any detail, any past wrong doing, and throw it back at them. And I'd feel awful. What kind of person does that? There's no excuse.
I realized a few things. One was that I never did this to other people. It was only my ex. It's not worth going into detail, not here, but the things my ex did deserved more that the infrequent reminder in poor faith. Some of them deserved jail time. But I digress.
I drove out to this tree, called the tree of life. A waterway has eroded the earth from beneath it, but this tree has survived via a tenuous grip on the earth, moving further and further away.
This tree has survived on what it could. My squid isn't a monster for grabbing what it could when it was backed against the wall. Maybe I'm not either.
