Catch and Release

Good things come and pass.

I watched the stream flow by, my mind miles away, tossed in the gentle swirl of the current over rocks and minnows I used to pacify myself in catching.

They never let me keep the minnows, my parents. As dainty and petite a pet they made at time of capture, they were not meant to be captive long-term. I'd be obliged to return them to their life cycle, to grow and flow downstream to the lake and mate and eat and mate until death or a fisherman's rod brought them in.

But for two days they would be mine. For two days I'd keep them sustained in my empty juice bottle, adoring them and imagining what our future could be.

If our future could be.

Over and over I had to face that it couldn't, and release them back into the current.

It seems my life is nothing more than catch and release, catch and release, catch and release until I'm left crouched by the streamside wondering what point there is to it all. What waste of calorie to capture that which cannot stay, that which lives a better life without my grasp.

I was a fool to come again, I decided, leaning back on my haunches momentarily before shifting to Indian style, there on the bank. I was a fool to paint the illusion of reality along the trickle of the water swimming by. A fool to assume the minnows wanted me terrorizing them and restraining them from their allotted course, that somehow I was an exception to natural law. A fool to want what clearly cannot be mine.

For even though you say I'm worth it and worthwhile, I don't see you ushering me into an empty juice bottle.

I don't see you trying to keep me, when I want nothing more than to catch and keep you.