Wild Eyes

.

This morning at 4:00 a.m. I woke up to the blaring porch light shinning at me through my window from across the parking lot behind my room.

I was thinking about the river, the mucky green color of the water and the bare light bulbs above the plastic screen doors, covered in flies, mosquitos, nats at night like a moth to a flame and then I was thinking about the back deck of the lake house, moss on the black metal, the sound the insects make in the night.

I used to spend so many hours in those waters. I thought about my swimsuits, the two pieces the one pieces, my lungs sometimes aching from so much swimming, my reflection in the sliding glass door, my friend telling me I had a pretty body:

becoming conscious of my body,

the leaking pools of youth.

I felt my heart racing and I knew I was a child.

Today I felt my eyes racing and I thought I was a child for a second there and then I felt this separation in my head, separated by the time and the distance and the everything in between now and then, I felt like a child in another person’s body: becoming conscious of my body.

When I was a child I always used to imagine that one day I could wake up as someone else, with the same mind but in a different body. I remember that I figured that it must be so close and so easy to just switch like that because all that was separating us was skin and I felt like the power of my soul was enough to jump out and go anywhere.

I suppose that in a way we choose what we remember and I don’t know why I choose to remember what I do. In the moment of the separation my life was flashing before my eyes: the plastic trays of cafeterias, the white tea and the woman from the green café who picked lilacs from my front yard and told me how to boil the water to steep the leaves without burning them, the summer heat, the intensity, the girl who threw that rock at my car.

I was thinking about my father and about my mother and how I am the child of the river and the waves of the great lakes.

I was the child of the river and the waves of the great lakes.

.