It was all so strange, how we first met, how it came about. Who could have predicted that clapback, that thunderbolt jazzing from a mediocre sky. It’s taken me a lifetime to realize what a crazy ride we’ve straddled, but if not the Mars Rovers, then what? A life with no surprises—we might as well be two rocks in a gravel patch on the side of the road waiting for a steamroller to pulverize us.
Nothing good ever comes of hasty relationships, though. We were thrown together, true, but it doesn’t have to turn into some kind of competition or anomaly we wonder about forever. I think of all these things. Do you?
You never speak of regret, never say the word. As if it’s a mountain you’ve not yet been able to climb (though not for want of trying) and are embarrassed to tell me about it. Because some revelations sting and some failed journeys fester in the hoping. I understand.
To you, God is the patient father you never had, the one who left when you were young. One day when you’re old, you tell me, you’ll look him up. Maybe he’ll still be waiting; maybe he’ll be sorry he didn’t stay. I think it’s a chance we take when it comes to God and fathers, and mountains we’ve yet to climb.
I’ve been learning about nature. At a mere 140 pounds, the tiny Asian sun bear is the most ferocious bruin on earth, attacking anything remotely threatening. I can’t imagine the rage, the over-confidence it revels in, the lives licked clean with its 20 cm tongue, honey from tree after tree after tree. It’s an animal I’d tend to avoid for fear of … something.
Sister, we’re not in the jungle here. We’re not animals. We’re civilized and real. We have heart and sorrow and forgiveness and a will to move on. And we share bone and flesh, blood and marrow, ingredients thrown together by mistake one dark drunken night long ago between two people you barely know and one I know so well. It’s DNA. It’s a story of beginnings.
I would give you mine—whatever it took—if that would help you understand how essential you are to everything living, breathing, known (and especially me); and how some things, regardless how strange or rough or forgotten or not said, matter.
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Chila Woychik is originally from the beautiful land of Bavaria and is of German/French descent. She has been published in numerous journals, including Cimarron and Passages North, and has released an essay collection, Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology (Shanti Arts, 2020). She won Storm Cellar‘s 2019 Flash Majeure Contest and Emry‘s 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award. These days she roams the Iowan outback and tends sheep, chickens, and two aging barn cats. She also edits the Eastern Iowa Review.