While walking the yorkie-poo on a usual Saturday morning route, to the coffee shop, over to the lake, around the path, and back to the apartment, I saw my ex-husband run past me.
He lives two blocks away from me, so I know there is a fairly high likelihood of running into him. Literally. We both run circles round the lake near our places. Who knows? Maybe we're chasing after each other all the time.
Other images and ideas have been chasing me, too. Ideas I cannot string together into any real sort of coherence just now. Labyrinths. Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. Tunnels and holes. The idea of falling down the rabbit hole. Alice in Wonderland.
Twice today while at a book store, (pre-coffee shop), I felt my heart jump twice--the first in the entry way seeing a bargain book called the complete works of Lewis Carroll, with Alice on the cover, and later in the fiction section while browsing past the classics and catching a glimpse of Alice in Wonderland out of my periphery.
I feel a deep obsession coming on. And how appropriate--I leap out of a marriage with a sex-addict right into a literary obsession on the works written by a pedophile. One who wrote a legendary story about a little blond girl getting lost.
There is something to the idea of the journey of female and child protagonists getting lost in a world of fantasy, myth, and confusion. Doors change sizes. Scarecrows talk. A giant flying dog saves a young boy. A boy lives inside a peach and talks to bugs. A girl falls asleep in the opiate haze of poppies. A girl eats a cake and shrinks. A girl finds herself trapped in a glass sphere, a wild party, where no one looks like anyone she's ever seen.
The ancestors of these modern stories, the fairy tales, set up the archetype. Children crave candy and are trapped by a witch. A girl discovers her grandmother is really a wolf. A girl falls asleep after eating a poisoned apple. A girl is forced to marry a beast.
And further back. Psyche finds herself in a cave hidden underground, told by her husband that she can never look at him.
In all these instances the protagonist is alone. Separated from family. Separated from the world she knew. There is an energy of seduction. There is an energy of confusion. Disorientation. The surreal. The dangerous. The girl does not understand her enemy, but she knows that following the rules she used to live by will no longer work. The people, the creatures, around her do not operate as she has been taught they will.
I felt disoriented when I saw my ex run by. I recognized his breathing first, subconsciously, so that when I saw his back my thoughts were--it really is him! I couldn't believe it. He looked fit. He was running. He looked healthier and saner than the rest of world. I was at my crumpled post-Friday night best. Raggedy. Disassembled.
Could it all, divorce, addiction, really have happened? Did it need to? Why does he look so normal when I am still lost in a world of confusion? A world of strange shapes? Why do I feel like the one who's gone mad?
He ran right by me. No stopping to talk. Did he wonder at the dog by my side? About my new life?
He ran right past. Bent on a course he knew well and had planned out ahead of time. I continued my own wanderings, lost, I am sure, forever in wonderland.
No comments:
Post a Comment