JiM's Dreams

COMING AROUND



I am all round, like a pear or a ball. It is either a great gift or a strange kind of punishment to have no straight edges to oneself. If pushed, I merely roll. If kicked, I bounce. Others fall over, then fetch up hard against some flatness of self that prevents them from straying too far from their natural sphere. But I, I curve and spin, traveling in great long arcs from where I began.

I used to want to be a pyramid. Something geometric and solid, with a square, dependable base. It used to be all that I wanted, long, clean lines rising straight up to a predictably elegant point. A pyramid does not spin, nor roll, nor bounce. No one expects it to move a micron when they kick it. So they don’t. That is the strength of the pyramid. No one thinks it will move, so it never has to.

But after a while, a pyramid loses its point. It doesn’t move and no one asks it to, yet it crumbles away back into the sand from which it came. When the wind comes, the sand curls and spins and swirls into the eyes. And then tears roll down and away.

In the end, then, all things come around, become round.