There is no “fair.”
Fair’s a thing that we’ve cooked up: A should be that never could be, nor ever has been, nor ever will be.
Cancer isn’t fair anymore than it was fair the day your friends surprised you with that meal and birthday cake and love you hadn’t earned.
Fair is what we want — or think we’d want, if we could remake the real world out of plastic, reduce life to a little molded car with pink and blue pegs traveling a cardboard map at the spin of a wheel.
Fair would make right angles out of mulberry leaves and issue dictatorial decrees about the number of berries that can drop and rot and the number that must be picked.
Fair is an endless, swinging stick wielded by a blindfolded child.
Fair’s the piñata we can never hit because we’ve made it up out of pique and old disputes about the equitable distribution of tootsie rolls.
Fair keeps us trapped in rulebooks and law books and endless, self-replicating statutes, breeding themselves like tapeworms in the riddled stomach of a feral cat, each segmented body this tit for that tat and under it all the rat-a-tat of gunfire in this place or that, reminding us that fair is a garden we can’t get to —
Or, no, rather, fair is the wrong turn on the wrong road, the one to the strip mall or the school bus graveyard and not the one that takes us stumbling home to the garden full of mulberry trees whose recalcitrant, prodigal leaves grow any which-way they wish to; where berries ripe to be picked fall anyway, and ants drunks with mulberry juice sing and jostle each other all the way back to the hill.
Home to the garden where the father still waits with the only thing there ever could be or has been or will be — the love that doesn’t demand anything at all, not even repentance, because, after all, love is not a switch turned off when the boy runs away and turned on again when the brim of his cap appears over the horizon.
There is no “fair.” There is only love or the lack of it.
Love leaves the garden to fill the places where it is not. It goes out into bombed cities and picks through the wreckage; it stops at each broken body and holds them and wails with them and bathes them and mends them and puts them on the road again so that it can rush to meet them when we come, stumbling home.
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