Walking on Alligators

Relationships, especially new relationships, or even long time relationships when you are known very well, are a lot like walking on alligators - so is writing.

A new relationships is like building a step ladder. The side rails encounter and put on the first few steps, solid. No worries. Then it seems they start taking turns adding steps, setting nails. sometimes a bit of wood has some rot left in it and just as you put your full weight on it, it gives. But you only slip one rung and it is not fatal.

Then each person is mounting a rung, a rung, a rung. Then one puts their hand against the tree, the house, the wall and pushes off. The ladder in the free air and all you can do is run.

Some people know.
They don't run.

The world is visible for them.They see beyond the physical troubles, the distances, the missing rungs on the ladder.

I am someone who is afraid of certain things. Having borne them and mourned already. Yet, I know, I was authentic and alive and real.
So here is a rung, screwed to the sticking point, fast, solid.

It is one rung.

But it is steady. And sometimes the view is the scariest thing, looming, a thunderhead, a bear upwind. It will come for you sooner or later. You could run. But you choose it. You turn into it and roar and wave branches over your head, and the bear runs away.

The bear. You fool the bear but the ladder and the water are waiting.

But sometimes the rung falls over water - those waves, churned, white capped, fingers curling, dark, dark. You just let it go. Let it go. It's not death.

It's life.