my dear deer signs and symbols...

a few years ago, in the midst of a fantastical cosmic personal relationship, for a number of reasons, i was questioning the logic/validity of my continuing in this relationship regardless of how very much i wanted, even needed on many levels, to stay - it was not a new question in this situation - the question was there from the beginning but i made a choice - a decision - to enter into the relationship because i wanted it more than anything else, even if only for a moment scratched from a day or a week - you know, there is a line from the movie "steel magnolias" where shelby says to her mother, "I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special." - well, like shelby, i chose my thirty minutes - in any event, as i had always known it would, the time came when i had to make a decision and i did - almost daily - the thing was, i always decided to stay - so in this state of ambivalence in which i struggled moment by moment, driving the long highway to work one cold morning, i began still another mental dialogue - stay or go - go or stay - and mentally phrased a request for a "sign" of what i must do - just something, anything, please! something to help me see my way more clearly - to give me the strength to take the way, the way only i could take - and with that thought, at the very instant, the very moment, literally, of that request, on this four-lane divided highway, in a commercially developed area, as i drove in the left lane, my eyes cast downward for a mini-second to glance at the speedometer and when i blinked upward again, there, directly in front of my eyes, at my eye level, was the face of a deer - a deer looking me straight in the eye - straight! her head/face were even with mine and her eyes turned directly into mine as she bound across my car and onto the median of grass - it was all so surreal that i was sure i had imagined it - it wasn't possible for the deer to be in mid-air in front of my car traveling in the left lane when there was another car neck-to-neck in the other lane - it simply was not physically possible - but when i looked in my side mirror i saw her bounding down the median - she was real -

just a few days later, again driving to work one crisp morning, still again, i was having this same mental dialogue, as if a deer appearing in my face was not enough, and was also recounting the dream i'd had the night before - a dream in which my friend had "died" and i saw him in his casket - and as i'm driving, with the mental image of his casket in my mind, still questioning, still asking for a sign, for assurance - i approached the same place on the road where the doe of a few days before had jumped my car and there, on the side of the road, was a dead deer - a doe -

now, it was autumn and in the rural area in which i live, there is wildlife - however, in eight years here, i had never before seen a deer on the highway, an extremely busy highway which spans the length of the state, nor have i seen one since -