The SpiderWeb

We drove to Arkansas with his father to share a condo with his
aging, yellowing grandparents. We smiled when we caught each other's
eyes, clasping our hands tightly together as if one slight weakening
would throw us both off to separate poles of the earth. Away from our
homes we forgot our inconsequential stresses, our hypothetical problems
and settled into a life that seemed perfectly to represent how our
future would be. In the morning, dazzled and frumpy, we would go out to
the tennis courts and sit on the edge of a large drop, licking fresh
pancake syrup off our fingers and admiring the lake from afar.
Contentedly, we watched our neighborly dew twinkle in the 10am sun. He
would point out to me things he remembered from the last time he had
been there: the dilapidated green golf "arena", the pool, that had once
glowed in chlorine freshness, now having succumbed to growing moss and
algae, the sparkling blue lake and old birds' nest he had once admired
from a safe distance when babies still chirped from its tangles.
We would walk around the tennis courts, wandering in and out of the
woods as if nervous of what was lurking inside. I stopped him once and
pointed up to a spider piecing together her web. We both watched as her
nimble fingers captured trailing filament and dragged it into place,
laboriously, beautifully. The spider seemed as gentle as a babe, only
doing what she wanted to without any other care in her tiny
world.
"It's so lovely. Should I get my camera?"
"Not now. Later."
We moved away, back down to the lake, forgetting the spider and her
web in a moment of exclamations and laughter over a sudden stumble. We
sat beside each other on a single bench, hands held in smiling hands,
watching the noonday sun rain down upon the diaphanous lake. Some boats
skimmed the top, their metal helms twinkling just as bright as the dew
melting into the air on our heels. We counted the drops of water left
to evaporate on the deck before us, tiny individual splotches as
illuminous and numerous as the stars in the sky. Turning to each other
simultaneously, we nodded our heads in agreement and swayed against
each other in the breeze back up to the tennis courts. The shade of a
weeping willow enclosed us in a comforting coolness, her tiny fingers
caressing our cheeks in the wind.
"Can we go back and look at the spider web?"
He smiled at me gently, delighting just as I in the serenity of our
environment, grasped my hand and walked with me back to the place near
the edge of the woods. We nimbly followed our path around the perimeter
as before and found the web once again, just as perfect, just as
wondrous, a blueprint of a rose trapped in an iridescent picture frame.
I squeezed his hand softly and smiled up at him. He brushed a piece of
hair away from my eyes and we walked back to the tennis courts to spend
the rest of the afternoon, comfortably secure in the arms of Miss
Willow and wondrously happy being near each other.
The next morning, walking again near the edge of the perimeter, we
found the spider web to be gone. Snatched away by the wind or clinging
to the wings of some careless ignorant spider, it was gone. The spider
herself had vanished along with it, as mysterious as the ship that
disappears with her crew. It did not phase me much at the time. It was
just something in the way of life. A piece of perfection built and then
simply lost among the brambles.
I wonder now if the spider disappeared along with her web in order to
send a message to me. Everything can be taken away, ended, lost,
destroyed in a matter of moments, just as the web seemed to be there
one minute, and gone the next.
But, for the moment, I did nothing but squeeze his hand and walk back
toward the lake, not noticing anything but the glint of light in the
corner of his eye. The beauty of youth and love is that we always feel
as if everything will last forever, this moment, this hour, this day.
It will run on loop into an eternity of beautifully perfect moments. We
always feel as if nothing will slip between our clumsy fingertips and
leave us forever wishing we could have gripped all the more
tightly.