I

”I let my neigh­bour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again

We keep the wall between us as we go.”

Robert Frost, The Mend­ing Wall

Where I end and you begin, the space I have to be me, that you have to be you. These are bound­aries: they hold what I value. They are made of hon­est, round stones…words like: yes. And no.

When I can’t find me, i usu­ally have lost my edge, the bound­ary. What I usu­ally tell myself how­ever is that there is too much of you. Really there is just not quite enough of me. When I lose the out­line of me, my bound­ary, then…

every­thing gets fuzzy, i dis­ap­pear. i am rolled over, i speak in the pas­sive voice. Things hap­pen to me. i wish. (I love the line: if wishes were horses, dream­ers would ride – although orig­i­nally it was beg­gars and not dream­ers. John Ray, 1670.) i dream. i mum­ble. i hide. i make it all about me so i can try to cre­ate myself, like whip­ping up a batch of cook­ies. i make it all about you so that i can at least make up a story about where you are and believe i might be near by, i get busy, make things hap­pen, draw a pic­ture of myself with action, but it is only lines, empty, a car­toon. i fuse with you and stick to you as close as i can so that you can tell me what my shape is. i pray for a divine inter­ven­tion to be the third ele­ment, the mir­a­cle, the glue to hold me together and to hold me to you, i get des­per­ate, unat­trac­tive, to put it mildly. i get sneaky.

I remem­ber read­ing The Mend­ing Wall all the way back in the sixth grade. Now I know what it means. It takes courage to walk the line with a friend, a neigh­bor and cre­ate the nec­es­sary dif­fer­ence between the two of us.

I so wanted to know what the buzz about love was about when I was young (like within the last 6 months, you know?) We are all brain washed to believe love is an oceanic merg­ing, the feel­ing at the end of a per­fume com­mer­cial (in which I can’t even smell any­thing). Real­ity: it is a nego­ti­ated set­tle­ment, a way to solve a prob­lem if I am lucky. It is good; it is wide and deep like an ocean too, but not the big merge. It isn’t what I saw on tv, heard on the radio (and believe me I was lis­ten­ing), read in books…except maybe that sixth grade gram­mar book: Good fences make good neigh­bors. Count on it.