When you're lost at sea, you paddle in the direction of the sun, because you're afraid of the night. To the East when darkness falls, to meet the daybreak sooner. To the West at dawn, to hold the light longer. And after all your energy is spent, you find yourself in the very same spot from where you began.
The most amazing rain in the Pacific Northwest happens in full sun. Out of thin, cool air, with not a cloud in the sky you are suddenly pelleted with a barrage of misty raindrops. In your confusion you try and find the clouds from which these drops have fallen, look up into the sieve, but then it stops and other than the dampness of your hair, it might not have really happened at all.
I sometimes experience falls from great heights. Great drops from heaven, a memory of a carnival ride. I hope that you’ll be there with me in spirit, to convince me that I won’t separate from the carriage, flung lost into the night. I hope as I’m suspended in the cold air, you’ll wake me before impact so I’ll know you were there all this time. Not like walking around with your calcified remains inside. Not like a lithopaedion. Not like a fossil I carried with me, but someone who would be there when at last I needed.
What will I tell you in those moments? That we had good tension? That we were like two ends of a cord. That we pulled in opposite directions as hard as we could. That sometimes only one of us did, the other dragged behind. That sometimes the cord lay unraveled in a pile at our feet as we apologized and repeated our never agains.
There’s a creek along the Mississippi that reminded me of how hidden I could be. For two miles it followed the path of a dirt road, but no one ever floated here. Because at one point it came to natural dam, thousand year stumps hidden in the summer darkness of sycamore leaves. Nothing grew in the understory, and it gave a visitor chills because there are no bare spots in these woods. Indian graves, someone whispered. But drop your hand in the dirt and you see why. The forest floor here is nearly bare granite. A half acre of natural linoleum. And the creek doesn’t die, but reappears beyond the dam where no one can see. Except me. I’d carry my inner tube over those stumps and float by myself, stripping to nearly nothing, wondering why you weren’t here in my life yet. In 92 it flooded, washed away the dam and let in the foreign world. At the banks, I cast my line and pulled in a walleye, a little perch with lines of teeth. As unhappy to be here as I. When the mud settled, you could sit on the banks and watch the dark shapes of alligator gar slowly skimming the surface.
We caught a bowfin once, though down there they called them grinnels. We always heard to throw ’em back, that the meat was rotten, but we tried anyway, to eat this ancient fish. Unsupervised boys running through the swamps doing what their parents told ‘em not to. We set fires.
What will I say in those moments? Now that I’ve been woven for so long into your existence, I imagine lines of ancestry and strange tribes side by side. Whom will greet me first? Now that I’ve lost you, will new lines form as you move on and add to our history?
I’m feeling impossibly mature just thinking about it.