The Stick

The child loves to go to the park and pick up sticks. Like a dog, he will try to bring an impossibly long stick home, but he is 4 and by 4 o’clock he is getting tired. He will not let go of one end but drags it, tottering to the waiting car, by the time he gets to the lot he is actually sleepwalking. I wake up; a wandering hermit crab slips back into its shell. That stick I had to abandon was a prototype, a totem, a measure of the many things I have had to let go of. That kind of midnight dancing is a stick that never ends. Loss is often only trivial a vexation, just something left behind we thought to keep, then maybe it’s an actual life that once drained through our hands. Whatever that stick represents perhaps like me, you still want to take an impossible thing home.