Like Wine

Something changed.  Maybe I just fell far enough down that I fell straight through the Earth.  Or maybe, as is the case, each time I woke up I found things changing slightly, mostly in myself.  But that's how it goes, isn't it?  The feeling has changed.  It feels like properly aged wine.  Where it was too sweet or too bitter or just not right, until one morning you wake up and it's just perfect.

But what am I saying?  I don't know anything about wine.  I don't drink often, and when I do, I have a hard time differentiating the taste from what I had last time.  It's all in the metaphor.  I don't know wines, but I'm a connoisseur in metaphors.  I've loved them since I first learned what exactly they were when I was nine? ten? years old.

I compare things constantly.  The first few pieces of what I consider to be my real writing are mostly metaphors.  The most memorable was about a page of writing, jumping from topic to topic, comparing one thing to another smoothly and effortlessly.  It was a stream of consciousness.  A directed one, perhaps, focused on the sensory and the comparisons to be made, but a free-write nonetheless.

So I come back to this metaphor of the wine.  Which is surprisingly inappropriate for the situation, but fits as well as anything.  Aged cheese would be better, actually.  It suits you more.  In a strange way.  But anyway.  This has become comfortable.  Which it has been for a while.  But it's a different kind of comfort.  It's like Quality vs. quality (yes, the capitalization matters) in Lila, which I haven't read since the one time I blogged about it, more than a year ago, I think.

This is the comfort of an old pillow, or a favorite pair of running shoes.  It's no longer the best.  But it's comforting in a very familiar sense.  It's what would be Comfort, with a capital c.  And I think that this has finally switched from being comfortable to being Comfortable.  It's gone from just being something pleasant to being something almost required.  Which has nothing to do with any of the food metaphors I started this with.

But again, the metaphors don't make the point.  They help it.  And I think that wine was as good a place as any to start this post.  And hey, it went precisely where I wanted it to be, so I consider this a success.