Walking on Skirrid Fawr

I have terrible posture, physically and emotionally. I’m always looking down. This means I don’t trip up on the small stuff but I’m capable of walking into trees, walls, ditches, dark alleys and dead ends. The upside is that I notice and cherish details…a snail, grass, people’s hands, the corner of an eye, a kiss.

I’m involuntarily drawn to the edge of things, the places where one thing turns into another, fact into fiction, land into sea, love into indifference.

Of course boundaries are dangerous, it doesn’t do to be on the wrong side of them. My addiction to them means I am never safely in the middle of anything, a genre, a relationship, a family, a landscape. I’m always on the sidelines, the outside of everything, looking in, neither fitting or belonging. But even this has advantages, edges are interesting, two things for the price of one, and not being in the middle of anything means I’m free to walk away whenever I want.

Sometimes I think I’d like to change, learn to look up more and try to enjoy middles rather than sides. But I think it’s too late. If I look up now and take a long view in my life there is the ultimate edge, the last edge that will see me safely, at last, truly in one thing forever. And every time I think I’m in the middle of something, I find I was at the edge all along anyway.

So I think I’ll hang onto my predilection for looking down, enjoying the details, the little features of transition from one thing in to another, cherishing the small joys of a harebell caught in grass stems, the touch of a hand. I will go on finding myself in unexpected dark alleys, featureless plains, but also at unlooked for waterfalls, beaches with white driftwood in the twilight. I’ll always value unpredictability in all things, from landscapes to lovers.

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