kneeling

We had been fighting.  No - not really fighting.  We had been not hearing, not understanding, not knowing how to proceed or what to do - what to even try.  

We had tried and failed and started and failed - over and over....

We were both feeling crushed and defeated.  Fear is so much harder than anger.

We were at the point of having no idea how to get through.  Sitting across from each other at the dining room table - words were done.  Neither of us could do or say anything right in the other's view.  

I got up - i imagine he thought i was walking away.

Instead, i knelt by his chair and laid my head on his thigh.  I stayed that way some time.  Slowly his hand moved to my head.  

And slowly we began to be able to understand each other.

Kneeling is not a big part of us.  He has me on my knees when he wants to use me that way.  And i appreciate the sometimes that he has me sit at his feet as we both relax in the evening.  

But for me to choose to kneel, to risk to kneel before him (to him?  for him?)  felt both wholly unnatural and like the only possible expression of what i was really feeling.  

Kneeling is so foreign to everyday physical language; it is so tied up in religion and mythology, fairy tales and  cautionary tales.  It is steeped in symbolism and meaning.  It is a big thing, an obvious, overt, and grand gesture.  It is what it is because it is physically risky, it puts one person at the other's mercy.  And it is just as risky emotionally as it was designed to be physically.  

And it was, at that moment, the meaning i couldn't manage to put into words.