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She had a knack for being overlooked, and preferred watching and listening to being seen. Unnoticed, she could capture the golden words dripping from their tongues.
One day Sylvie sat at the base of a tall oak tree, curled over her notebook, when the Lovers walked by.
They were made of black tar. They oozed rather than walked, with limbs entwined, so close there was barely space between them. While she couldn’t make out faces in the tar, she had the distinct impression they were beaming at each other.
Sylvie was fascinated.
She wondered if they really were made of tar, or if that’s simply how they looked to her. The things you see are never what’s really there, she knew, especially when you have a notepad in your hand.
Sylvie watched the Lovers ooze down the path, oblivious to her presence, and she began to write a story about them:
Once upon a time there was a vast pit of tar, so deeply black and sticky you could lose yourself forever gazing into it — and several people had.
It was blacker than the depths of space where no star light had ever been, darker than a soul that had never known love.
The tar was an emptiness knowing only itself.
One day, Pelican flew over the tar pit and looked down. “I wonder if there are any fish in that black sea?” he thought.
Down and down he glided for a closer look. All he could see was black, blacker than the blackest black he’d ever known.
He saw no signs of fish and flew even lower, almost skimming the tar, just in case.
The tar was very hungry and hadn’t seen anyone for aeons, and so, it leapt.
The tar splashed up over Pelican, who honked in protest, but there was nothing he could do.
The bird was pulled into the black.
Pelican struggled in the thick ooze, unable to see as its dark embrace pulled him deeper. Soon he stopped moving, but he did not suffocate. The slime in his nostrils held magic that sustained him.
Once Pelican realized he wasn’t going to die (and what a relief that was!) he started searching for a way out. He couldn’t fly under the weight of the tar, nor could he swim, so he flailed his wings and used his bill to suck in mouthfuls of tar, tasting like licorice and sand. Slowly, he propelled himself forward.
Pelican squirmed and swallowed around the endless tar pit. For days, he pulled himself through the blackness, until he’d almost forgotten there was such a thing as the sun or the sea.
It was horrible. Torture. And there was no way out.
Pelican had long since given up counting the days, but he knew he’d been trapped for a very long time, when it occurred to him that maybe he was looking in the wrong place.
It seemed a very strange thing to think. When everything around him was blackness, despair and tar, where else could he look?
He remembered what Mama Pelican used to say, “You can’t find fish in a mud puddle.”
She’d say it whenever he did something pointless that was making his situation worse instead of better.
What if he couldn’t find the way out by going deeper into the messy pit he was in?
But where else could he look?
With the tar engulfing him on every side, there was nowhere else. Except…
Pelican turned his attention Within.
It wasn’t nearly so dark in there. In fact, he found a spark of hope, like a tiny match.
Within wasn’t a space Pelican was used to exploring. He bumped up against complaints and objections:
He was never going to make it out; this wasn’t doing anything; he ought to put his attention out there where the problem was, where he could make a difference.
But Pelican was on the other side of desperation, having given up trying and when there’s nothing left to lose, so he didn’t pay these thoughts much mind.
He kept looking, and his attention was drawn to the spaces between the complaints. It felt lighter, and he breathed easier. Somehow, he stopped thinking about the tar.
The lighter he felt on the inside, the higher his body rose. Higher and higher, until he was floating on top of the tar.
Pelican felt the wind on his feathers and wiped the goo from his eyes.
The sky! He was free.
The bird shook his wings, preparing to fly, when he heard a voice.
“Don’t leave us.”
The voice was deep and resonant, creaking with decades of despair. It belonged to the tar.
“Stay,” it said.
Pelican had no intention of staying mired in the tar pit, but he paused. “Why don’t you come with me?”
The tar bubbled with joy in response.
Pelican opened his bill and invited the tar inside. Tar slid into his pouch.
“Not too much,” Pelican warned. “I need to be able to fly, you know.”
And so, Pelican took off with a pouch full of black tar. Little bits of tar dripped from his bill as he flew, falling down to the earth.
Where each drop fell, it became a person, always searching for their way back to the whole. They’d search the world looking for another tar being to complete them, and when they finally found one other, they swore to never let go. Except they did, because no one can hold on forever.
“You’re looking in the wrong place,” Pelican would tell them, shaking his head at the silly tar beings looking everywhere except the one place where they could actually find what they sought. “You can’t find fish in a mud puddle.”
Sylvie stopped writing and chuckled to herself.
That’s what these lovers were like, she thought. So wrapped up in each other.
It was fun watching them moon about, but it didn’t feel like love at all. It was sticky and suffocating.
Sylvie wondered if she, too, might be looking in the wrong place. She was always searching for the perfect word or the perfect story.
“I’m always waiting for the story to get good,” she thought.
Sylvie realized that she’d been so busy making up stories about other people, waiting for her life to happen, instead of noticing what was already happening her.
“I can’t believe I’m taking advice from a pelican,” she mumbled.
Sylvie looked Within, and her real story began.
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