Two metaphors

To endure the dislocation of loss, you resort to metaphors. Perhaps that’s our defining characteristic as a species: we’re storytellers. Stories are patterns, and patterns are comforting. I read a book recently about evolutionary psychology. It said stories developed partly to fool others, and partly to fool ourselves.

My most recurring metaphor has been the most useful. Many mornings when I wake up gradually on my own, as I open my eyes I say the same three words to myself:

Wrong planet, again.

Here’s what it means. My space ship has crash-landed, and I’m marooned on the wrong planet. There, you can see the wreckage right over there, still with a bit of smoke coming out of it. I’ll never be able to get back to the right planet, the one with my son on it. So I’m stuck here.

The aliens on this planet possess the ability to project illusions. Some of the aliens are very decent and kind. They can make it seem as if I’m on the right planet, sort of, and sometimes I’m even willing to believe it. But this is the best I can hope for: that I can go for longer and longer periods of time without remembering once again I’m on the wrong planet.

---

A second metaphor is less useful, but it also often hits me every day, like clockwork, as I glance out the window while making morning coffee.

Our house backs up to an embankment that leads down to a large flood plain, at the end of which is the Assabet River. For much of the year, you can’t even see down there for all the leaves on the trees. But during the winter months you can see the entire plain, where along with all the other trees down there, there’s a single birch. All the other trees are brown and indistinguishable from each other. But that single white birch stands out so beautifully from all the rest.

It was so stunning that we thought we should take a photograph of it and frame it. It stood so tall and — you have to believe — proud. It was special. It was so unlike all the others, etched with detail. Imagine how much we enjoyed its beauty. We were thinking of hanging a picture of it in the same sunroom facing the back where for a good part of the year you can see the tree itself. You don’t need any photo. It’s right there out the window.

I never got around to snapping a photo of it. It’s one of those things I thought I’d get around to eventually. And then last winter, we had a storm. A lot of heavy, wet snow came through and sat on all the trees, weighing them down for over a week. Some of the more brittle trees snapped. Others were uprooted. Some of the trees with softer wood, like the birch, simply bent.

The birch is no longer really standing, but it is still alive. Bent out of shape, it’s now growing off completely to the side at a 90 degree angle. You see it, and the visual metaphor is immediate and unmistakable:

Bowed, but unbroken.

But it’s no longer proud. It struggles. Its branches curve over like fingers of an arthritic hand, trying to grasp onto something, painfully.

As you drive throughout eastern Massachusetts, you see many other birches bent over everywhere in the forests next to the road, struggling to stay upright. That was from that storm last year.

I walk down the stairs every morning throughout the winter. While making coffee, I look out the window, and see it there again, bowed but unbroken. This is what I say:

“Fuck you, visual metaphor. You can go to hell.”