Hide and seek

As an adult, you pretend you don’t know where anything is.
Where are my keys?
What’s my password?
What is this life and where is it going?

As a toddler, you know everything.
In months you mapped the house.
You know how it all works.
The clothes cleaning apparatus is down there.
The books are here.
Night nights is cozy there.
The adults go in circular patterns, but, crazy as they seem, everything eventually comes to you.

The dog understands this.
The food bowl here, the treats there, the leash in the closet.
It’s all understood.

Somewhere, some time, you entered an agreement to feign confusion.
Maybe it was in jr. high. Perhaps in high school.
Times when things seemed chaotic.
So you agreed with a wild and seething mob that things were lost, places unknown, and ideas misunderstood.
And you scrambled to play along, crafting an actor’s story around your self.

And those adults – what a game they played about time-pressing importance, intricate moralities and perceived justices.
But some of them slipped cryptic notes under your nose.
Notes written by dead people like Joyce, Camus and Kafka.
They wanted to see if you’d smell the sweetness of small truths.
And the coldness of large ones.
Things that would take a lifetime to ravel and unravel.

And all of it an exercise for a two-lobed electrical muscle.
But you knew what even they knew when they were toddlers.
All is here and there and everywhere.
And there is a wondrous game of hide and seek – with language, with postures, with gestures and with overtures.
Some play it elegantly, and some play it furiously like a wild dog without a bowl and some spots for itself.

Either way is fine.