when you can't run, you crawl and when you can't crawl, when you can't do that...
you find someone to carry you. she was more radiant than i remembered, her hair suggested that she had scalped a black lady. well what about when there are only one set of footprints, those smallish ones with evidence of callouses marked in the sand there, an indication of more barefootedness than i could recommend with the tendency of people to smash bottles where they please?, i asked her. those were the times that i carried you, she informed me. and the overly large footprints? those with the telltale converse all-star tread, if they made converse all-stars for sasquatches (sasquatchi?)? where did those ones come from? those are the times that you carried me, she replied. and those vast tracts of emptiness with no footprints at all? those are the times we carried each other, she said. when we held hands and lifted off and proceeded to float six inches above the ground of a world that had hurt us too many times to be trusted. well, that all makes so much sense i said to her. but these greenish-brown puddles everywhere? oh, she said and laughed. those are the times we threw up. it was like they say, like no time had passed at all. something caught in my throat and burned in my eyes and i spent a lot of time after the hug just looking at my shoes and not speaking up because i didn't want my voice to break, i didn't want to fall to pieces. when i had swallowed hard and often enough to suppress that feeling, we sat on a washer/dryer set and talked like there was never a time when we didn't. see, there was a drug once and i guess it's a drug often associated with the word dragon. and there was a princess once who was really a dragon. and the boy wasn't a brave knight but a cowardly squire, and the drug and the dragonprincess, they got all tangled up inside him and threatened to rend his foundation until the squire himself collapsed. he was far from blameless because he chose them both and failed to walk away when it became clear that he should. and like all dragons, princessdragon had a forked tongue and, o, did she speak with it, spitting lies in the direction of each fork. those lies weren't refuted with the speed and earnestness they well should have been and all seemed lost because the REAL princess was driven away by both metaphoric dragons. well, all was NOT lost because, though she wasn't his princess in the sense that he would be her prince (a VIKING prince with long red hair would have that singular honor, a story for another day), she was the fair and just ruler of his land, his reminder that he did not walk alone in the world. the sun when he needed real warmth, not the false fire of the dragon winging its way through his circulatory system. with such an uncommon bond in a kingdom that, though splendid, had not even begun to reach its full potential, he saw that dragons of all sorts could be barred from both his real heart and his symbolic one. and the princessdragon spent like 24 hours in a dungeon of some kind, also a story for another day. the moral of the story is that some bonds are not made to be broken and hope is alive as long as we are and we should just keep carrying each other and caring for each other because we are both more valiant fighters than they would ever give us credit for and our happily ever afters would be nearly as happy if they didn't involve each other, forever and ever a-men. NOT THE END, JUST THE BEGINNING...