RELY

We use this word only in the presence of an absence. Embedded in its meaning is dependency. The very idea reeks weak and makes many people freak, loco with bullshit that the individual’s virtue rests on independence. Okay, go ahead, run into the woods, and settle with the bears with your axe, rifle, and fishing rod in a cabin with ceiling-high stacks of firewood and an iron kettle. Spin out this fantasy in your head in your suburban enclave. You still can’t escape the word’s most basic understanding. Nor can any of us who live in a society, in relationships, and recognize our vulnerability to all forms of toil and trouble. To deny that we rely is to refuse that we are creatures who crave connection and desire love, limited by ability, judgment, and the capacity to grasp life in depth. A need for others touches every dimension of our well-being.

Despite this truth, many ignore it until forced to by misfortune. And even then, we, if lucky, just scrape the surface. Help obtained, a fix determined, and on we go unless we have no mend, no help that reverses the mugging, no quell for the hell. Where are you then? You could be on the street, homeless, on the move, stateless, a refugee, on a side hunted by hate, cut down by mindless chance, an orphan, found hungry by nature’s whims, by drought. Bedtime stories don’t speak of catastrophe, but it’s everywhere you care to look. We’ll have a cozy tale. The hard meaning inside rely scares us; cue the happy fling that clings to the heartstrings’ plucky music.

Tragedy, the kind shown in the theater, copes with the darkest implications of rely by taking a standup character and bringing them low, broken, and lost from their moorings. Watching, we separate judgment of the person’s action by recognizing our kinship with the ruined figure in their suffering. Tragic stories tutor our understanding that suffering is at the core of lived experience. It’s not a bug but a feature, Doug. As observers of tragic tales, we take pleasure in our imaginative embrace of ruin that spares us from its fateful fall. The phrase, thank God it’s you and not me, passes our lips, and with a brisk flick of the wrist, a bead of sweat pops out and away is flicked.

Is irony to blame that, having studied and taught tragedy in class, it became a real and intimate part of my life? It did not, by any grand, disastrous norm-shredding immorality, but by a mundane act of chance playing with mortality. The word fall feels burdened by its meaning of human failure. But when stripped to its simple form—a person, standing on a porch in the dark in earshot of a beach and the murmur of waves, steps forward onto thin air—it is no less terrible.

I know the fall did me for eternity, not dead, but the grove in my moves fled. Whew, that’s rich, but it ate my lunch with a casual crunch of my spine, leaving me in an ongoing discovery of the ways of relying. Trouble, I have it, but not alone. We use the word love like a side of fries offered up with the main meal. I love my job, my dog, my car, what’s bitchin’ about my kitchen, the feel of your hair, the flair when you’re bare, the cut of your jib, the mother in you, the fun in you. But what if love is the grit in the hard bit, the rare care, the trust that won’t bust, a grin when it’s grim, never wanes when comes the rain on my ragged parade, gives life its lift when all seems adrift.

To nail the grain in the vein of this tale, I rely that she, call her J, is by my side. What will she get if the wit lies wrecked, he that once was, is the fun now stunned? Ask, is his heart big enough, does his effort have merit, can he cast gloom from the room, make the day a sunny sashay, act to keep fear far, and show a will for fight toward the light, not blight? There is only try to comply with rely once you’ve been wham, blam, and goddamn slammed.

What does it mean to be swallowed by rely? I might wriggle loose enough to flash my caboose, but it’s the feint of a man saying Glory, glory Halleluiah!, inside a whale. The whale shrinks to the size of a fish thundering in the bath when embraced by love. Oh, cornball/ But, yes, it’s true. This is her story. Don’t look at me and say ‘Such strength,’ look at her. I do and say, If I am a foot, you are my earth. / If I am desire, you are my skin. / If I go on four feet, you are my forest. / If I am a bird, you are my sky. / If I am a man, you are my breath.