The pen trembles between my fingertips as I hesitate. This is one of my loops, I think, and something pounds in my chest.
Glasses touch the keyboard. Discarded. Shoulders up. My hands cover my face – a child who thinks she can hide from it to make it go away. But it won’t.
Therefore, I do not run from it. Why try?
I see myself through my mother’s eyes. I’m living her loops. And I’m so scared because I realize how little control I have now…. how much harm I’ve unintentionally done.
My whole body begins to shake. It takes me under the waves.
I remember the first time…
My face got wet, and it scared me.
That’s probably the honest truth of it.
It draws a chuckle out of me when I write this. My shoulders relax. The sunshine seems to be coming out from behind the clouds.
I don’t know how old I was, but I know we were living in the old trailer. The one with the pool. I was six when we moved away, so I was somewhere around that age or a bit younger.
My aunt and uncle were visiting from out-of-town. We were on the back deck that my dad built. Water wings were sticking to my arm pits, raking my skin, where the edges of the plastic came together.
I couldn’t swim. It was deep enough my feet couldn’t touch the bottom, and I had to cling to the outer edge for dear life or be drowned. Or so I felt.
That kind of thing is instinctual. It feels the panic before anyone else knows what’s happening.
But Uncle Fritz did.
I think I remember seeing his face just before my nose went under. The look of recognition goes bleary in the chlorine water, but it emerges with a proud grin.
It’s smiling as it calls me a champ and waits as I rub my eyes with a pout.
I snort the water out of my nostrils.
Suddenly, a flash of my daughter doing that once sends me into a laugh of recognition… She’s me, you see. We’re sharing loops like a double-helix of DNA, stretched across time and energy, cycling with the stars.
We’re not the sun, though. We’re specks in the yarn-ball web of energy that mankind weaves around the earth.
Yes, for all my sunshine and spiraling, I know my place in this world. And I agonize over the selfishness of a life on loop. A life like mine.
My eyes do that weird double-take across the keyboard. It takes me back to the first time I remember that sensation …. in the old house that burnt down. I was looking at the chest of drawers when they jumped. And jumped. And jumped some more.
Am I searching for my uncle’s tanned shoulders to pull me from my drowning? Is this the reason I’m always searching outside myself? I shake my head, back and forth. Disappointed like my dad… My grandfather, too… in the times I went another way.
Not theirs. Not the right one.
Have I still not learned to swim alone?
Nay, I say, have I still not even learned to float?
Is this, too, the reason I go out of my way to offer that thing I’ve wanted so much for myself – that proud grin of recognition and reassurance? Especially when I believe I’m drowning. Whether I am or not. As if, if I give it away for free enough times, perhaps, someone’ll give it back.
Or perhaps…
The hint of a grin smirks my mouth with a thought.
One must learn.
It’s in us all, isn’t it? All I’ve been is afraid.
I’m not the sun, but sunshine was put in me, wasn’t it? It’s in us all.
Exuberance comes and goes – a flare gun shot, dying in the water, it feels. Thought it was a firework, it did. Poor thing.
Shh– between us, that’s your inner child, unknowing, ignorant, and more often than not, scared.
Above all, scared.
You’re doing great, though, I say, as I swim away … to drown alone in peace.
Though, as I always intend but sometimes do not get around to, I come back around to my hesitation.
I let it linger – the thought of asking you, of looking to some outside force to tell me all the answers that already lie within me.
The tanned shoulders are my own. They’re stronger now. They can swim. They can carry me now.
And when they can’t… I can always float.