I have finally gotten to the point of summer where I'm reading novels poolside and burning the absolute hell out of my shoulders.
This is bliss. If I time the day right, I'm sharing the oasis with the retirees of my neighborhood. They're face-down on large floats with bright-red leathered backs to a clear sky. The teen girl lifeguard seems to look up every few minutes from her kindle until she sees one of them swat a fly, then she goes back to her reading.
The water is lukewarm, which is a sensation I did not expect when I dipped my big toe in like an anxious toddler. For the next two hours I switch between wetting my book's pages with pool water and then letting them dry in the heat. Towards the end, I just stain them with sweat by using the paperback as a sunshield over my face for a brief nap.
I grew up spending summers in very loud pools. But I guess I was also a part of that kicking, screaming mob at the time, too. The days of hot-pink goggles and flower-power-patterned floaties feels like an eternity from where I am. I remember looking up at the older girls on the deck from the deepest I could paddle and wonder what must be so fun about seeming so boring, far from the joys of swallowing gallons of pool water between laughter.
I had never been to a pool until my parents bought our first house in the middle of a recession– a little single-family home, two stories with a huge backyard. Allegedly, the homeowner prior to us, according to the gossip of the handful of kids in the cul-de-sac, was certified insane and had fifty huge, black dogs. He had also supposedly dug the giant pit in the corner of our backyard in a bout of his mania, just for kicks. It made for an interesting backdrop to justifying ghost stories as we got older.
There was a small stream less than half a mile behind our white fence. Shrouded in a creek far from the paved suburban landscape that was dominated by late night kickball games and lemonade stands and nail polish sticking to cheap carpeted floors. The neighborhood kids had used large sticks to break the foliage into a trail straight to the heart of the stream where you could perch on fallen logs and watch the breaks in the water run their course.
If you were lucky, there would be tadpoles shooting to hide under rocks from our sticky hands. If you were brave, you might find a whole frog to capture between your palms and run the half mile home with.
But it wasn’t the frog that I was trying to take home, really. It was this feeling that you’d almost weep from when you’d crouch really close down to the earth. Closing your eyes and listening to the way everything around you seemed to hum with a type of life you had never been surrounded with before. Something you were distinctly not a part of. But still, in the curious nature of children, desperately wanted to fit into. Leaning just a tad too close, little hands would break the water and pebbles at the bottom would cut into open palms. There was a realization that you were in the midst of something that you would never flow with, but always break through. Some days you’d just take home bleeding palms in the same tender way you’d cradle a frog. It was all the same– a trophy of your youth.
I think now, more than a decade later, I’m constantly recreating this scene in different ways. Still desperate to fit myself into a beautiful something. I’ve kept the habit of closing my eyes and trying to swallow the goodness of a scene whole. Almost like if I pretend hard enough to blend in, everything surrounding me would forget that I’m only visiting.
Present day, I’m watching my soda sweat onto the pavement wondering if the cool older girls from 12 years ago were looking this boring while stomaching the doom of their youth from a distance. Wondering if the heat wave got a little worse, I might mistake a rogue pool float for a mirage of a younger me. Goggles over her glasses, screaming for dad to throw us into the deep end one more time before the adult swim whistle ruins the fun.
Memories come at these times in the oddest way, mimicking loud gnats fighting for the right to buzz incessantly in your ear. I’m reliving the last 19.9 years in the chronology of the cycle of grief while lying completely still– like a pre-death montage in an action movie where the narrator comes to some great realization about life. But instead of shaking fiery ash from my brow and limping into the sunset, I get up and ask my sibling to help me reapply sunscreen to my back.
Life goes on.
I am learning, in the ignorant part of my youth where I phrase things like I know everything, that growing up involves a lot of mystery. A lot of questioning yourself into admitting that you are not all you thought you'd shape up to be. A lot of closing your eyes and pretending these selective anecdotes are the beautiful places you belong. Places that tell you all the things you want to know about yourself, because surely the answers have always been there.
They’re somewhat evidence of life, but not when you lock yourself in them. You get too big for those rooms. Eventually you can only peer in with one squinted eye and make the best of that perspective. This seems like an unreliable way to discern meaning from life.
In some sick joke from the universe, the space in time between what we have and what we want is truly what we need. Not a hidden message from ourselves, but the space itself. Time. Distance. Good ole inward thinking. A reflective surface (say, a freshwater stream or a chlorinated pool) that you will never quite match up with. Just familiar enough to recognize the changes in.
Signed,
Mariam
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