The slip of a toe from the pedal, the momentum lost—bodies pushed forward, then backward into their padded rests. It’s this ebb and flow, the negotiation between “Faster!” and “No, slower,” that swirls in the depths of her psyche’s ocean.
And yet writing coaxes it all to the surface.
Until a side trip—two crabs holding up their muscular pinchers, ready for a match—creates a challenge of its own. Progress, upward and steady, is not to be. Not yet. She is weak-spirited, a rubber-band man on the corner, his loitering ways doling out time like candy at a small-town Christmas parade.
She loses again. Flips time out of her walle,t two bills from a rubber-banded roll. And her freedom—paid for in gold—is hers again.
But not for long, she senses. The current sweeps her into a worrisome game where gaps feel like holes in a stroke victim’s brain scan, holding her most unsettling thoughts.
She floats in and out of hopelessness, the vacuum of a current pulling her into its taloned grip. Her care goes numb. She is under. And no one cares, she tells herself, as if that belief were a balm rather than a blister.
And it goes the way it does. Nature’s job to kill off the old to make space for the new has already set the stage. And if she surfaces—perhaps when she surfaces—she hopes to say it was worth the ride.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 