A Lifeline
If it weren't for the pandemic, I would be traveling. If it weren't for the issues of time and money and work and family, I would be swimming in warm water somewhere. The ocean is a lifeline to freedom and buoyancy and ease.
Years ago, when my blood pressure shattered a night's sleep once again, we found the emergency room, once again. The lifeline was the drip, drip. It was a hose, but not from the backyard spigot to nourish the herbs and the lemon tree and the jasmine climbing up the back wall. This hose was moving from a loosely hanging bag brought to my bedside by a soft-spoken nurse, inviting me to relax and take deep breaths. Sometime later there was a definitive diagnosis and the lifeline leading from one kidney to my heart was augmented to keep the life line open and the blood flowing freely.
Chocolate has been a more recent lifeline. Snacking chocolate with almonds and coconut. The name implies something better, something justified. Just a little bit and all will be well. If it weren't for the pandemic I would be eating chocolate in Morocco or Berlin or the Galapagos or Mexico or Italy. And swimming, replaying my life without this pandemic or those years of hospital emergency rooms. If it weren't for having to wrestle with blood pressures, for me, or alcohol, for him, perhaps we would not have found the lifelines which invited us to live. A lifeline? A line from potential death or illness back to health. Like from the world of Hades back up to the surface.
I am swimming among images here. Wrestling with metaphor and wondering if it weren't for the pandemic, where would I be right now? Not in front of my laptop on a sunny Sunday. Perhaps choosing between meandering some cobblestone street far from here or dancing and sweating at an outdoor concert in Madagascar. Like the one we wandered by so many years ago when traveling with our sons.
If it weren't for the pandemic would my lifeline be the freedom to just pick up and go? Not to leave forever, but just for now. To be free to choose. Perhaps my lifeline is choice. Not to feel obligated. I want to be responsible, but the masks and the caution and the warnings about where to go and what one can do are not a line to the life inside of me. The constant juggling and having to choose what risks to take. That there are always risks now, so it is a matter of which ones can be tolerated. If it weren't for the pandemic I would take my stable blood pressure and my sober son to Russia. The Trans-Siberian railroad beckoned last week. Before that it was Patagonia. So many places I have never been.
For now my lifeline must be the places I have gone. Among others, Croatia and Portugal for us , and Madagascar with our sons in tow. The future and hope and possibility, these are the lifelines now. Slowly dripping from an IV bag, into my days and nights. If it weren't for the pandemic…