This is me

When the sharpest words wanna cut me down

I'm gonna send a flood, gonna drown 'em out

I am brave, I am bruised

I am who I'm meant to be, this is me

Look out 'cause here I come

And I'm marching on to the beat I drum

I'm not scared to be seen this is me

“This is me,” theme song, The Greatest Showman, 2017

This is me - standing up free and tall - when I hear this amazing song to affirmation and acceptance of who we really are. Yes, I’ve had a lot of trouble with this attitude I have. Consider this recent theme song for a film in conjunction with a brief childhood adventure outdoors that I’m about to describe to you.

What makes the song and a child’s early experience coexist in my memory?

I am here and this is me, open to ecstasy. A real non sequitur, but it’s the response I have. Follow me back, if you can.

I am here, in my flesh-colored, nubby swimsuit that is making me look skinnier than I really am.

In my back yard.

My arms dancing. They won’t stop, despite everything.

Me, standing, hopping, gaspingly happy in the rain. Swallowing it so it too could run through my veins.

Me, hearing my mother’s voice criticizing the choice, her choice, of a swimsuit for me. Her choice. Looked like something from the 1940s, post-war lack of style. The suit, however, had to be from the 1950s. I always felt my mother lived in the past, and that embarrassed me no end. Old-fashioned, I’d mutter, and sneer slightly.

Me, years later, finding a photo of the child I was in the rain. Black and white, colors that in this case disappoint. Only in my mind does the pinkishness remain; my mother is long gone. So is the back yard. Maybe the suit was burned, like a bad idea.

Me. A girl of four-ish age. Singing her heart out. Heart inside filling all four limbs with something akin to joy. Perfect pouring down of rain, stuttering ashen clouds, no lightening, fortunately.

This is me. Living to the fullest the liquid conversation that was nothing but knowing the precise place to be at that moment. The last perfect moment of my life. Explosion of everything perfect, or nearly.

Held by the drops and droplets, first warmly, then coolly.

Then came the song. Any song. A song of water wheels and creeks. Created a long time before 2017, now preserved only in fraying gestures of fingers and tiptoes. Impossible to hum now, it was there, I’m certain.

This is me, still the singer of that wandered-off song in the rain. Wondering why I remember the rain and the suit when I sing it, but not the melody, never the words. An essence, not something to read off a page.

What else was there, in my back yard? The light around me absorbed it all is the only thing I know.

Elevated, free. This is so much me. Surrounded by rainlight. Immortal. Divine. In an ugly swimsuit.

But this still doesn’t explain the persistence of the memory. Describe what she looks like, how she felt, they say. But why doesn’t the image fade? Nothing but a little girl, her body inside an ugly rectangle, swimming in the light.

Swimming. In light and air, often seen as aspects of joy. Floating without losing the feel of green wet grass blades on sole and between toes. Climbing the light is sometimes the last gesture of life, before total darkness. No darkness that day, despite the clouds damp and deep.

A life in a moment, still so new and attached by the umbilical cord to the source from inside the house. That is what was leaping about like a feral animal, feeling safe.

But the ugly nubbiness, the stretchiness across little girl bones, not long enough to be clumsy. The hated suit, hated because her mother hated it and whispered it loudly to her mother. Was it something she had said or done to be given such a mean suit?

I can’t locate a photo of the suit online, but could sketch it if pressed. It was like a second flesh, that rosy beige, washed out even though new, like a fragile, worn hand towel. It was too much like flesh, it was like donning a second skin to go out naked, doubly so, in the rain. It was a straight-edged rectangle of different skin, held up by lumpy tied straps.

I was ashamed. My body was not for display. I hoped people who saw me would know it was something worn on top of me, that the uneven, thready, puckered surface was not, despite its color, my dermatological identity.

This is all so odd to me, to my years later me, but the rain dancing moment - stretchable into an hour, two, even three, if the weather cooperated - comes to mind at least once a week. I mean, there’s no way I can say how long I was out there in the warm downpour. Basically 90% of the times it rains - and therein might lie the explanation for my feeling of being stalked by the ugly bathing suit - when it rains I am four or five again. Trying to get soaked so I can sing about it.

This is why I use umbrellas as infrequently as possible. I keep one in my car but have no idea if I have another in the house. I did buy myself a nice black umbrella in Columbus, Ohio, for my birthday. Big, black, ugly, like the stormy city and the lonely me with nobody to celebrate that day. It rained sideways, and I ended up teaching in wet clothing that afternoon. The dampness helped hide the tears.

Then there’s the mad visit I made to Machu Picchu, dying from the altitude, knowing it would be pouring at dawn. My only concern was possible water damage to my passport. I had a good poncho and had forgotten about an umbrella. Superfluous, I thought, and a burden because I need all my strength to climb these stones. I need rain to wash it all away. It.

That rain was different than the one in my back yard.

There’s a reason I call a very rainy European city my second home. Here, I carry an umbrella more often than not, but still keep it closed if at all possible and a hood on a jacket does the trick. Occasionally I play a game with my little girl self: I have to catch a bus to where I live, a few kilometers away, and need to figure out whether an umbrella is worth the trouble.

One day I’d left the house ‘unarmed’ for possible precipitation, knowing I was (ironically) playing with fire, and had deliberately dawdled in the city, running errands. As I got on the bus, the windshield recorded the splattering and the wheels on the trip spurted the quick drops back onto a surprised pavement. I knew what was coming.

I pushed the button for my stop, ready as ever. No, I hadn’t forgotten my umbrella in the seat, hadn’t even brought one. Defiant. Maybe hopeful. Out of the belly of the bus, both feet on the artificial white stone, I resisted the temptation to run, to avoid getting absolutely drenched. No, I wasn’t wearing the ugly flesh pink nubbly suit, but it felt like it. In my mind, I was there, calling to the sky’s enormous wetness to bathe me and bundle me in its immortality. In reality, I had to walk a certain distance, uphill, and that would require about eight minutes to complete, at the end of which I would need to use two keys to enter my residence, adding more time to the dancing in the rain experience. I arrived as expected, the water having waited until I was inside the house before it drained off me into messy puddles on the foyer rug.

I am not a stranger to the dark

"Hide away, " they say

"'Cause we don't want your broken parts"

I've learned to be ashamed of all my scars

"Run away, " they say

"No one'll love you as you are"

But I won't let them break me down to dust

I know that there's a place for us

For we are glorious…

Are we glorious? I ask that question whose answer I knew when I was four or five. I ask because all the downpours in the world haven’t washed away the knives I keep hoping will rust and stop.

The sharpest words… Blood.