Troughs

How many years now? Four? I wondered about the time and how she became this person so familiar to me with a newness clinging to her. Forget what I thought I knew. So beautiful, I recognize that differently than I did when I was younger.

Walk this path together in the misty air down toward the river. Side by side, our arms swinging, then a brief accidental contact and I cross my arms to hold my stomach. How strange, it begins to all unfold, how a part of everything she was. All this forgotten in the years and now presenting itself steadily, showing other sides of what we were to each other. I turn the small bits over every time she says do you remember this or that. No, yes, I vaguely remember.

“You remember the name of the rabbit I had when I was 9?” I ask.

“Of course, you were so passionate about naming him Mud.” She’s laughing now and I feel relaxed again. Settling into this thing I’ve been away from.

“Sir Muddles actually. Mud to the inner circle, so you should feel honored.”

“Oh I am.” She’s looking and I can hardly meet her.

“Remember we’d throw the 4H seniors in the cow trough? Remember that?” I ask.

“I remember, not you though.”

“No not me.” It's okay, I thought. Yes, I resisted, I didn’t want my hair to get wet, flat, reveal more acutely the true shape of the face I hated. A face and mind to match that I felt didn’t belong in this organic world with so much dark soil.

“Did you get thrown in?” For surely she would look wonderful drenched in dirty cow water. Laughing, wiping her eyes, pulling her hair back into a slick wet bun.

“No, I ran when they tried to catch me.” She smiled. All the colors in her face swirling together, saturated now. All the colors if they had the chance to reveal her like the world after the rain. How did she belong so perfectly there?

Oh, I’ve been looking in that way. She said nothing, only reached out her hand with the ease of a root finding its snug home in the dirt, being lifted and guided by the thick air, and rested, just barely, her fingers on the crook of my neck to catch a tear on my cheek with her thumb.

“What just happened?” She asked me. What did? Why cry? What does my lip have to tremble about? It is so humid, that tear could have been just another droplet from the world around us. I liked that we were in this oppressive and quiet heat together, both feeling it on our skin. The cicadas made themselves known in the quiet between us and I loved them.

As though I were swimming, only now did I remember I must come up for air. I pulled my face from this delicate girl before me and gulped. A noise somewhere between a gulp and a whimper. The sound of it welcomed a lilting giggle from Margaret that played across the space between us, resonating through the buoyant air. The sound from me hitched her mouth up on one side, and every color came from her face. So love brings these colors; it brings the water her fingers find against my cheek. Let her stay. Let me stay.

I’ve already done it. I stayed. Now to meet her with the primordial instinct of reaching for something, of our hearts going out to each other. Let her reach you. Let her hand linger on your cheek. Let yourself be natural, soft, organic. She kissed the tip of my nose and turned towards the river.

It was foggy and raining softly. I was left standing in the shallow bank of this warm, gentle river as she swam out to the middle. I watched her move through the water, every drop of rain existing for only a moment as its own tiny universe expanding in orbits of perfectly circular ripples all around her. Moving through water is ancient, artful, and somehow, I felt that she belonged there more than I did. It felt more honest to watch from the shore. I could just make out her shape, her small face pale against the darkened water, turned up towards the rain. I looked on and as she swam back towards me, something funny happened: for the first time, I felt part of it all. Before, I would watch the world like a scene that was playing out before me. Assuming it was for me, only a spectator, and what I did or didn’t do was of no consequence. That she wouldn’t be affected by what I did or didn’t do; I believed I could not influence her. I am foolish, I move the impossibly soft sand with my toes and change this tiny part of everything. I was scared by what I could not make sense of. I could not arrange in any logical way the past, the time without her, and now. Not knowing yet that reasoning about these things, about her, about myself, my mind, my place in the world, it would not take shape in my head because it is so much bigger than me. I need to stop trying to reason. What use is reasoning when it means that I flinch my hand away instead of letting it stay where I naturally had it, within her reach, without worry of if it might be held? Please, I talk to myself, I talk to myself now, please stop repeating, please stop reasoning, please don’t take away the connections. Get in your body. My mind, make it slip through the netting down my neck, down my veins, bring hand and hand to thighs to knees to ankle, to sand. The water around, touching me, what is actually me. Worrying over every little thing takes me further from the real world, it leaves me hollow and disconnected. So what if my hair is wet? So what if I don’t like how my mind runs sometimes? Aren’t I still here? A part of everything else? Can’t I let the world respond to my presence as it would without trying to manipulate my place in it? She swam closer, all wet limbs. I can just be, like everything else, and take what comes from being what I think is myself, free from reason, with grace and without struggle. There was a rhythm, I could feel it pulsating in resonance with my heartbeat. I have been part of the beautiful environments that are not before me, but surround me, welcoming me into this thing thrumming with life. The environment has given credence to my being there, being part of it, as natural as the trees who had time to root. And she sees me. She sees me with the world all around, just as I see her move with so much ease passing through the water, the air, straight through to my heart, and it warms to her.