by Malik Will
December 25, 1954. It was Christmas. Caroline and I exchanged gifts. It was the first gift I ever gave her. I don’t why because she’d always find something to give to me. Maybe, I was just beginning to understand the meaning of Christmas.
I made her a necklace with these beautiful small stones from our backyard that I neatly laced together with pink embroidery thread and on top I transcribed a few words that said, To you my love.
She, on the other hand, painted three beautiful pictures for me. As matter of fact, I still have them to this day. All three were paintings of long bodies of water. In that water were big fish, small fish, and everything else in between. Each picture also had this big shark in the middle as all this sea life floated around it.
She said the reason she painted three was to signify the setting. The first picture took place in Africa, the second in the Gulf of Mexico, and the third near Australia.
In every picture were different sets of sea creatures of different colors from different places. But what stood out was that the shark in each painting was the same.
When I asked Caroline why she kept the shark the same, she said the shark was us. She explained the nature of how sharks travel endlessly through time, reaching different borders and distant shores. She said a shark travels so far thinking someday it will reach a new destination that looked different from the last. But it was destined to live in the sea, and that is where it will remain. She said the unfair part is that the shark doesn’t know of its destiny. It only wishes it can reach a new land so that maybe it to can one day feel alive.
It was a depressing picture for the likes of Christmas. Though I didn’t understand it at the time. I was just happy about getting something. I think her point was that hope is only false when we try to change the inevitable or when we try to defy nature or science. It is then that we become lost in our hopes, where we lose ourselves.
You see, my mom and dad could not be changed. And even when they were, they found themselves slipping in the same place they rose from because it was their nature.
If we continue to try to bring about that change, we will only move in this endless cycle, looking for somewhere and traveling everywhere, while going nowhere, like a shark in water.
CHAPTER NINE
Light to My Path