Invisible Strings

It was the fall of 1960, when it all began. The very first time that they laid eyes on each other, dancing on a Saturday while a live band played, fate on their side.

I wonder what they would have said, had they known that was the beginning of their legacy, of children and grandchildren. Generations created from a chance encounter.

What might have happened, had the lady not made the choice to ask the gentleman to dance, her former flame watching from the side. He says he wishes he would have had a rose in hand when she asked him to dance.

I wonder if my parents had known they would fail, would they have thrown caution to the wind and tried to challenge their fate ahead. What might have happened, had they realized we are molded by our origins.

The woman who lost her father and her home to a war, never moving from the red brick stone home, afraid that if she’ll move an inch, life will take a mile. The man who came from nothing, willing to sacrifice anything to get everything he never had, shaped so deeply by the place he had now outgrown. 

I wonder if collateral damage could have been avoided, that threw my life off course. I’ve never known a moment of standstill, wandering from one place to the next. I hang up photographs so that the empty walls I’ve built around me hold memories.

I wonder if I’d stayed longer in one place, I’d find my roots in the earth and not in my mother’s eyes or my brother’s laugh. She says maybe we are the lucky ones, to find a home in each other wherever we are. How valuable to realize, that roots can grow in people too, the ground seems much too fragile. Movements I had cursed becoming hidden blessings.

Where I had so often felt untethered and out of place, as the light-haired child of two dark-haired parents, I simply didn’t look back far enough to notice my grandmother’s blond locks, like I failed to notice the invisible tether connecting generations, binding me to those that came before.