“This Forgetfulness of Living”
The Meeting Place. TWENTY-SIX.
Phoebe had fallen into a deep sleep on the massage table and Val let her be. She took all the dogs, the two Gypsys, Lucky, and Lucille, down to the river unleashed, something that would have given Phoebe pause, she knew. But Phoebe’s mutts needed to learn the ways of the land for however long Phoebe’s story would keep her, Lucky and Gypsy here. They were creatures with instincts that could adapt and sharpen. City restraints weren’t practical out here. Leashes included. Like noses and hands, snouts and paw pads needed to find new reasons to be in a fresh place that offered unimagined amazements, stimulations that might wake in them what Buck in The Call of the Wild found when he met his destiny in the Yukon after being kidnapped from his realm on the ranch in California.
Val smiled to think of the seven-chapter novel, the one that she had read many times. Jack London? some would say with a smirk. What a misogynist! She didn’t care. She had learned to love so many things that came with thorns. And Jack London was one. How could she not embrace the soul that had come forth with language like the lines she had marked in her dog-eared, tattered copy of London’s classic (which she believed was much more than a tale for children).
Val could recite the full passage from memory, “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself [herself!] in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”
Val had been motivated by that idea, that forgetfulness of living. Within it was no room for the past, for envy, for regret. To acknowledge the ecstasy that marks the summit of life was her wish these days. She wouldn’t capture it in every moment, but if she was attuned, she could awaken to what London had known as a burst of being with no strings attached!
Like last night, when she kneaded Phoebe’s shoulders, not thinking of the ways her old friend had hurt her three decades before, but instead making contact with the strength of Phoebe’s spine, pressing into the flesh of another, recognizing the structures that hold the body together, bringing attention to the ripeness of the contact, the fluid coupling, the asexual, unbranded collusion of part on part, self and other merged into something more.
Val sat on the outcropping above the pool that eddied just below the rapids. The dogs nosed about in the low-slung manzanitas, their deep bark the color of a broken heart. She could let it all go, the abandonment, the violence, the foolery, the slap in the face to friendship that had separated them for so long. People change. She had said it out loud. And Phoebe had replied with, That is true, Val. That is so, so true. Now was the time to brave the waters of snow melt and form a new pack, not from old bonds, but from fresh ones.
Let there be beauty between us, she prayed as she pulled up some yarrow and sweet pea blossoms and tore a thorny branch of honey locust for a bouquet she would arrange for the altar on this day of beginning again.
The Meeting Place note: Val’s story appears non-linearly. Check out earlier companion posts to this one. The Meeting Place is a jigsaw of fictional vignettes hosting several female characters destined to cross paths. The series began with The Meeting Place. ONE. (May 12, 2022).
