Hold Fast

part 1 of a three-part series by Tara Cruz

I tend to surround myself with words. Metaphors, symbolism, imagery—this is how I make sense of the world. And often I am drawn to something before I fully understand what place it has in my life. This is the case of the three pictures now hanging above my sofa.

Three images torn from a book and framed, rather inexpertly, by me. (I rarely take the time to measure things properly.) They’d hung on my wall for weeks before I really studied them and grasped the story they so clearly were telling. It was the story of our last seven years broken into three parts.

The first is an image of a hand clinging to a branch, a bit desperately in my opinion. It reminds me of a Robert Frost poem about grapes. In the corner there are two words, “Hold Fast.”

“Hold Fast” sums up the first three years as succinctly as the smell of lilacs sums up spring. Hold fast was all I could do. I held fast to a husband I feared, if given a chance, would slip off a precipice and be lost to me forever. I held fast to a son, just entering junior high, whose catastrophic first week left him homebound in our 1600 square foot house. And I held fast to a daughter starting tenth grade, who wrenchingly wanted to make things right for everyone.

I also held fast to God. Not in a nice, friendly let’s-hold-hands sort of way, but rather a white-knuckled-dangling-over-the-abyss sort of way. My hand clenched. My fingernails gouged deep. The tendons in my wrist were tight to the point of snapping. My whole arm grew numb. How could I even be sure I still held on to something?

We were not dashed upon the rocks. -tc