kite
I sat on the grass and looked out onto a field.
A young boy was trying to fly his kite.
“Take a look at that,” said the old woman to my right. She had listened to my story patiently, perhaps glad that she had someone to talk to as she rested from her afternoon walk.
“The boy with the kite?” I asked. I had just emptied my eyes, and the pain in my chest was a hollow ache.
“The boy really loves that kite,” she observed. “You can tell!”
We watched as the kite almost launched with success a few times, then dove straight down into the grass. On the fourth fall, he dropped his spindle and went to pick up his kite to examine it for damage, or to clean it.
“Sometimes you get ups, and lots of times you get downs,” she said. “Sometimes you need to stop and check and see if your kite is okay.”
The old woman stopped and began to focus on the ground below her.
“That boy has been in the park every weekend, trying to make that kite fly,” she continued. “I’ve seen him succeed, and he was happy when he had that kite up in the air where it belongs. Even if it was ten or thirty meters away, that kite was in the sky.”
“One day,” she said, “he may let go of that kite for any reason. The wind will be too strong, or the string will unravel. He’ll be sad, but he’ll let it go, and maybe he’ll be happy to see that kite fly higher and farther.”
“The wind don’t blow forever, and the kite returns to the earth, maybe the boy will find it, or maybe he won’t. I think that’s what love can be like.”
We sat there and silently watched the boy continue to work on his kite.
While this analogy was quite clever, I still felt terribly. But this has given me a little resolve.
Tags: May 2009
