an elle-phant never forgets.
“I’m feeling a little wobbly right now, like my training wheels are off – except I look back and realize they were never actually there and I was holding myself up all along.”
“Ah, you and your metaphors, Elle.”
“There’s just no one holding up my seat and running beside me like I thought there was,” I said to him. At him. About him. And I know he knew I meant him.
I think there is always an empty feeling once you lose a pillar you always entrusted to hold you up. But the feeling comes on twenty-fold when you realize it hadn’t been there for a long time.
When you look around and feel like your life is completely uprooted, like a scene from a Tim Burton movie where nothing is fully plugged into the ground and at any moment a tree may begin dancing on its upturned roots, there’s an excitable sense of terror. In a fun way. And you just want to put on your 3D glasses and see the miraculousness of Lila, divine play, in everything around you. The problem with 3D glasses is that everything seems to be coming straight at you and even though you know you aren’t really in any danger of getting knocked over, you duck and dodge anyway.
I feel like right now, life is pointing a pistol at my feet and saying “Dance!! DANCE!!” Luckily, I’m an Irish Dancer and I am quick-footed. But at any moment now, life might start shooting the pistol on either side of my hips and shout “Shimmy, bitch! SHIMMY!” Then I’m really screwed.
Until then, I won’t stop banging my feet on the sturdy palm of earth in a brilliant display of the million different ways I can hold myself up.
And you never forget how to ride a bike. Besides, I happen to have the greatest crash equipment money can’t buy – these people.