Friends, Americans, Countrymen, lend me your eyes.

Thanks to all the loyal readers and friends who have reached out to me in the last several months, checking to make sure everything was okay. It wasn’t, but it was. Nothing to alarm anybody about. Some of my undoing was my own doing, some of it wasn’t. It was a trifecta of loss, two friends and a leg injury got me down just as spring was cranking to full throttle. As I said on this day in 2021, life will kick you in the teeth time and time again but I just picture myself crawling to my knees, bloodied and disheveled, motioning for more, and grinning madly.
Because weakness is fear. And I ain’t skeert.

You ever win one of those goldfish at the fair? Like, when you weren’t even trying to win a goldfish, you were going for bragging rights against an old high school nemesis, or maybe the carnies offered some grand cash prize. But carnivals are twisted, and you have not a snowflake’s chance in the Sahara of winning what you really want.

And you’re presented this sad little goldfish in its tiny plastic bag. If you’re unlucky, and the goldfish has a supernatural will to survive, it makes it through the jostling of the carnival, staring out and swimming madly but going nowhere, until you make it home and dump it in an old vase filled with chlorinated water straight from the tap.

Then your children fight about who’s gonna feed it for the first two or three days and maybe they overfeed it. Maybe the goldfish dies and it was a short lived memory of a pet you can use as an example of why they’re not responsible enough to have a puppy.

I’m off track. So the goldfish is unhappy in its unnatural habitat. You can spend a lot of money making things nice for the goldfish: getting him a filter and some real plants and one of those trunks that open and close, aerating the water. You may clean his vessel three times a day, making the glass sparkle and gleam. However, the goldfish longs for the stagnant pond with his friends and this one other goldfish he swam around eating the same larvae with, whom he had his tiny heart set on. Where what he could see was his for the taking, not unattainable, not a life outside his own. The goldfish remembers freedom.

So now you’re the owner of something you don’t want, that you’re holding on to out of obligation because you won it. You bested the system and got your prize that you’re seeing is no prize at all. You could turn the goldfish loose in a stream, or take it to a friend who has a pond. But no. You’re gonna see this goldfish through to the end because it’s your goldfish. You might fool yourself into thinking you’re doing the goldfish a favor, you’re saving it from cold weather and the predators of the world, like snapping turtles, bullfrogs, and those goofy long necked birds. You tell yourself the goldfish has a great life, protected and well fed. You even trick yourself into thinking you care about the little guy, that it’s nice to come home and see him there, always there.

But the goldfish remembers days before the square glass box. The goldfish remembers long happy days, swimming for hours and never encountering an obstacle he couldn’t swim around. And now the goldfish is so despondent he lays at the bottom of his prison, color fading, until one day the little fish becomes fish food.

And you wonder why you confined another animal for so long, limiting its life to the minuscule environment you controlled. It didn’t contribute to your happiness much in any way, you saw the little fish as one more thing to look after, to clean up after, every day.

All because you had to win the ring toss, when you really only wanted the cash prize.

I have held up my promise to myself, my New Year’s Resolution, for writing every day. There were days I skipped, but I came back to fill in. There were times I could only write a paragraph. But it was all so close to my heart I couldn’t put it out there for public consumption. But I’m taking my life back, I’m not letting anything else happen TO me. I’m not protecting myself by withdrawing. I’m not waiting around on something to happen. I suffered through much of spring and all of summer, and now I’m not wasting any more time. We don’t even know if we have it to waste. I’m not trapped like a goldfish from the fair. I can swim anywhere I choose. I can eat more than rainbow fish flakes. I can make new friends while hanging with the old. Life is too short to live it in limbo. Don’t wait for anything, and don’t EVER put your key to happiness in anybody else’s pocket.

Get a dog instead.

Love from Appalachia,

~Amy