Crossing Tinker's Knob

by Inglath Cooper

The thought was a selfish one. After all, she had known from the beginning that the bar had been set too high. That in spite of what they felt for each other, people were different, and no matter how much they wanted to believe otherwise, those differences mattered.

But this was no longer true, their lives having unfolded along completely different roads. With this realization-though it was hardly a new one—the bridge he’d built to a new life collapsed within him. And it felt like losing her all over again.

“You don’t get to choose, you just fall.” – Author Unknown

Gran had always filled up the space around her, added dimension and depth to it by the sheer force of her personality alone, her laugh the kind that made people feel as if the room had been flooded with sunlight.

If memory could be found on the taste buds, then a hundred of them flooded through him now. And at the very center of each was Becca.

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. – Emily Bronte

“What’s wrong, Martha?” he would ask, the question her invitation to pour it all out to him. And she would, talking until she could begin to see reason through his eyes. That was the kind of man he’d been. A man who thought with straight-line logic, able to weigh the positives and negatives of a situation without the smothering cloud of emotion that tended to affect her own judgment.

I’ve looked at the possible answers from a dozen different angles. And what I’ve come up with is this: most people justify their actions with excuses they believe cancel out their own accountability. Most people believe they had no choice to do anything other than what they did.

Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to look beyond the parameters of the boxes we put ourselves in. And maybe that is the one thing we should somehow find a way to do.

Becca couldn’t quite remember what it was like before he came. She only knew she hadn’t walked around with a bubble in her stomach, half hoping they’d run into each other every time she stepped out of the house, half dreading that they would.

Outside the open bedroom window, moonlight illuminated the ridge of Tinker’s Knob. She stared at its dark outline against the night sky. And she wondered then how many amazing views she’d missed from the safety of her spot here at the bottom.

She looked up at him then, and there it was again, the undertow. She felt it swirl around her, a gentle yank of concession. “Just for a minute,” she said.

She understood then in a way she never had before what it meant to find the one against whom all others would forever be judged. The one for whom there would be no comparison.

“Abby, I trust your heart. It will tell you what to do.”