Never Forgotten

So many good things in life are tenuously anchored and it only takes a good quick current to carry them away.

I always discover this the hard way.

That's me, there, clinging to the branch that has the potential to save my life, but even greater potential to snap and take me with it over the edge of the fierce waterfall.

Today I watched a documentary on people with Bipolar disorder called Of Two Minds. I remember thinking to myself that these people can't be bipolar - they don't have enough cats.

One of the characters in the documentary said she preferred a natural method for controlling her disorder, versus pills. She called it a change in lifestyle. She seemed perfectly normal to me.

Recently I lost a tooth, and I cried over it. Recurring nightmares prior to the occasion sometimes feature scenarios in which all my teeth fall out, possibly fueling the emotional reaction that caught the dentist by surprise. "Oh," she assures me,  "lots of patients cry over teeth that have to be removed." But her initial look of surprise gave it away. No one cries over a tooth.

There are little things we get emotional over, and there are big things.

I recently received an email entitled "Creative Non-Fiction Project: On Life." It absolutely floored me. Decimated me. Made me realize that I had tremendous power over someone I love... And yet I have none.

We all do. There is no one we have more power over than the people we love, while simultaneously having absolutely no power over them.

What's more vicious is the power they have over us.

Two words, just two written words, on any other day might have been said, or taken, in jest.

But on that day, they were savage. Cry-worthy. Devastating.

A wise friend once told me some fantastic advice. "Assume Positive Intent," he said. You see, too often I assume the negative - usually because I don't have enough information and am too non-confrontational to ask. And usually I find out after-the-fact that I was wrong to assume the negative at all. "There's more to the story - and two sides to every story," my wise friend says.

But how much, exactly, can I read-into two words? Spoken words have inflection, expressions, body language, volume, and sometimes spittle, to provide clues of intent, meaning, emotion...

But written word - it must be carefully crafted - and even more carefully read. Written words can take on new life, new meaning, new character, when heard in our head. That voice in our head can be merciless, suspicious, biased, and way off base. That's the power of written words.

I therefore respond to those two words with these carefully crafted two words: "Never Forgotten."