You were always the scorpion, I thought. I thought it with a certain frightful glee, and I used to imagine how you had left your mountain and gone to my river on a cold, cold day, over rocks and under vines as the scorpion of the fable, to my river wide and swift, ferreting about the bank for a way across.

And just when it looked like you’d given up and turned around, you saw me waiting. I was always waiting, and even then it seemed obvious that I was the frog in the rushes, watching you prance upriver, downriver, for the water was cold and you could not swim. The grass by my river was red from frost, but you glided over it as over worn out dance hall floors, and of course I said yes when you asked me to carry you on my back across the water. How could I not? When else does a frog get to swim with a scorpion? So I quenched my fears, yet scared I was still, for you were my first scorpion, so dark and daring and deadly.

I even told you the story once, and you laughed when the frog said “how do I know you won’t kill me?” and the scorpion answered “because then I would die too, for the water is cold and I cannot swim”. How stupid frogs can be. I never asked you like the frog asks in the fable, and I never even saw your tail, I just savoured knowing that you, you glorious scorpion, needed my wide frog back to ferry you across these wide waters, savoured it even if I knew from the story there would be a sting, and my frog legs would go limp with paralysis and my frog mouth would tighten in fear and gasp “why, you foolish scorpion, now we’ll both die and not reach the shore?” And you would say “But… I could not help myself. It is my nature”. Then we would sink to the bottom of these muddied waters together and drown.

And now we’re finally here, mid-stream, slowly sinking both. But as I want to tell you I forgive, that I always knew how this would go, and turn my head to look at you, there is a sadness wide and swift in seeing the stinger at the end of my tail.