time for a change

a little bit of jersey

Run Baby 

            I’m not proud of it.

            It was just never the way I pictured it, it wasn’t any of the millions of scenarios I invented. It wasn’t even a version of any of them.

Mark just reached in-between the sofa cushions one day, like he was looking for loose change, and pulled out a little velvet box and opened it and pointed it at me, with the ring looking so worn and tired, and he said, “Baby, will you marry me?”

I didn’t have time to register any of it but I was shaking my head and through a lump in my throat, I told him “No, honey. No.”

The smile slid off his face so quickly, and he just sat with a look of utter pain in his eyes, like he’d been hit in the temple, and I kissed him on the forehead and walked out of the room, pressing my lips together all the way to the bedroom, where I locked the door and lost it. 

In that moment, when he was looking for where he’d hidden it, I felt like that was it, the velvet box, that thing every girl dreams about, the most important question anyone will ever ask. And while he was looking, all I could think was no, please let it be something different, not this, this is too important. I pictured people seeing the ring and asking about it and pictured myself having to tell them no, it didn’t come at the bottom of a glass of champagne, or tied to a thousand roses, no, we weren’t standing underneath the Eiffel tower, or overlooking the Rocky Mountains at sunset, no, we weren’t in each others arms, just breathing, no, he didn’t write me a love song at a karaoke bar, no, not on the big screen at a baseball game, yes, he found it in the couch during Wheel of Fortune.

Every disappointment I’d ever faced, every second I told myself that he’ll be better later, he’ll really come through some day, do something to knock me so hard off my feet I’ll fall for him all over again, came flying back to me. I realized he would never come through that way, and every single pressure I’ve ever felt behind my eyes and across the bridge of my nose came rushing like a rapid. 

I cried so hard it hurt under my ribcage. I cried for him, for me, for us. I cried for the ultimate assurance that I couldn’t fool myself any longer. I cried for all the time I’d spent, all the years with this man who didn’t understand me, didn’t even know me enough to make even the slightest romantic gesture towards something I’ve been talking about for at least a year and dreaming of since I knew how to dream.

When I was finished crying, I did the only thing I knew how to do, something my mother taught me, and I packed a suitcase. When I stepped out into the hallway is when I saw it. The ring was on the dining room table, nestled in the opened box, still hopeful. Mark was gone, I didn’t know where. I put the suitcase down for a second and tried on the ring on the ring finger of my right hand. I’ve never worn a left ring finger, and never will till I put on the only ring I’ll never take off, and this, I thought, this isn’t it. This is settling. This isn’t who I am. 

I took the ring off and put it back in the box, and left it open, the way it had been, so Matt wouldn’t think I’d taken it by accident. He was a good guy, I told myself, he was a good guy who maybe didn’t know better.

I got in the car, and it was already 7:34 at night, and I remember looking at the time and trying to decide where to go. I drove down the street first, and around the corner, and stopped there to think in case Mark came home while I was thinking. It would be so awkward, I thought, him seeing me sitting in the driveway right before I drove away from him. 

My hands were shaking, and my heart was pounding, and I couldn’t bring my fingers together into a fist or even enough to clutch the steering wheel the right way. It felt like how it feels when you’re lost and adrenaline is pumping through you and your head is so clear, so clear suddenly, but your body is blurry, and your breathing is deep, and you start to talk to yourself to keep calm. I told myself to breathe even though I was already breathing.

I needed a place to go for the night, that was certain, and I couldn’t go to a friend, or to Mom and Jared’s, because that meant telling them what had happened, and I wasn’t done living it enough to relive it for someone else. I decided to drive down to our shore house, our place in Wildwood. It was nearing summer, now, and all the kids would be down by the boardwalk like I remembered, and I could put my toes or maybe my head in the sand and just think for a few days. 

Driving, down Route 17 and then onto the Parkway, into the sunset, the colors bleeding red and pink and tangerine all over my windshield, I thought for the first time of how it must have been for Mark, expecting a yes, being so sure of a yes all this time, and hearing a no. Did he even hear it? Did he just see my face fall and know and get in that place, that feeling where everything sounds like a vacuum? Maybe he didn’t even hear me tell him no. I hoped he hadn’t.

At the exit for Wildwood, there was a line of cars half a mile long, like there always was when it got warm. Always traffic, always teenage kids who just passed their driving tests hooting and honking and playing Springsteen loud through their rolled down windows. Down they went for prom to drink illegal beer some older kid who remembered what it was like to be underage got for them. 

I was one of those kids, once. Prom weekend, we’d hardly changed out of our dresses, and we were packed into two cars speeding down the highway to what we thought was freedom. We all went down by our house, and there were nine of us, five girls and four boys, and my mother told me I’d better make sure no one drank or had sex. On the way down, we lost the boys’ car for a while and I found out later they’d stopped at a gas station to buy condoms. It was what everyone did, back then and probably for years to come.

It’s a right of passage, almost, to see the shoreline at night, huddled beneath a blanket with your toes in freezing, wet sand. The way the water sounds, the way it feels to get that tiny bit of salt spray on your lips and feel it spread across your tongue, how all you can see for miles through the horizon is black, like staring into a hole, but how behind you, everything’s lit up for miles in bulbs every color of the rainbow. There’s nothing like it; that shore is magic. 

When I got down it was almost 10. The sun was gone, disappeared completely somewhere out over the ocean, and I let myself in and walked up the stairs and into the living room and just sat in the dark, letting the light from the street lamps filter in through the windows. I felt safe, here, where no one could find me for a while.

In the back of my head I knew this would be one of the first places they’d look if Mark got worried and decided to call them. I could hear Mom’s voice through the receiver, loud enough to hear all the way across the room, yelling What do you mean, she’s gone? And then Mark would have to explain about the proposal, or maybe he’d make something up, say we got in some fight, but probably he’d just tell Mom the truth. And then she’d get quiet for a minute and take a breath and say Oh honey, I’m so sorry. She’s that way, sometimes. But she wouldn’t tell him I’d gotten it from her. 

A half hour later, my stomach moaned. I picked myself up, not realizing I’d just been sitting, thinking, for so long, and that the adrenaline had finally started wearing off. I walked down the block to the diner, not a diner, but the diner, the one I’d had burgers and fries at since I was 8, and stood at the lectern waiting for a waitress to see me. 

She was an older woman, they always are, but walking into Jersey diners, the right kind, anyway, you see them younger, the way they were in their heyday, where they'd roller-skate your burger and malt car-side to you. Diners feel like time capsules, sometimes, the way you can always count on them to be there because no matter how health-conscious and nuts people get, everyone wants a chicken fried steak sometime.

She sat me down in a booth and I thumbed through the menu even though I knew what I wanted the moment I walked in. She came over, waddled over, almost, in her apron and thick-soled, white sneakers, and said What’ll you have?

“I want the turkey club, please. And a large tomato juice. And pie. Cherry pie.”

“You must be starved, sweetie.”

“Starving, yeah.”

“Now let me look, that’s the new turkey club, I think, with avocado and swiss, right?”

“I’m really not sure, whichever you have is good.”

“Well, I’ll jot it down and get Beth to put it in the register for me.” 

She was talking to herself now, and called over Beth, a younger woman but already with deep blue bags beneath her eyes and Beth peered through her glasses and finally said, All the new stuff’s under ‘breakfast,’ just put it in there.

When she brought my sandwich, I wolfed it down, eating and eating, stuffing it into myself, even past the point when I was full, because I needed it, because I felt so empty inside that I had to fill it with anything I could get my hands on. I dipped each French fry in mayonnaise and then in ketchup, chewing so selfishly, like I’d never seen food before. I licked my fingers clean, like a mongrel, and leaned back in the booth, and rubbed my hands over my stomach, pregnant with anxiety. 

I turned and saw myself for the first time since that morning in the mirrors they have all around the place, and I hardly recognized myself. I looked so small, and my eyes were so big, and suddenly so full of tears. I pulled my hair down to cover my face and started spooning pie into my mouth, bite after bite of tart, sweet, gooey goodness. When I was finished I told them I needed the check and I asked where the bathroom was. The waitress pointed me over past the bakery shelves, and I walked quickly, seeing the room in a blur.

Diners can always be counted on. The bathroom was one stall, and I locked myself in and looked at myself and just looked and looked, like I couldn’t get enough. I couldn’t decide on myself; I kept trying to pass judgment but it was just too hard. Was I a good person? Had I made some terrible, irrevocable mistake? Was Mark too good for me, and always had been, and I had just let him walk away? 

When I finally came out, and went back to the table, it was cleared except for the check and when the waitress saw me she looked relieved and said, Well I thought you’d cleared out.

“No, still here.” I said it so meekly, like I was shrinking into myself.

“Well the check’s just there and—hey, you alright?”

“Yes, fine,” I said, shaking my head at her in that oh-silly-me way.

When I paid the bill, I left her a fat tip.

I walked back down the street slowly. Our house was just across the street from the ocean, a perfect property, and I could hear that surf sound, the pure moaning of pure, marine things that echoes up every street, so much cleaner than anything you ever hear in a conk shell. 

Back at the house, I realized no one had been down yet this season, so I had to get a flash light out of the kitchen and climb back behind the house and turn on the gas and water and electricity. I made it halfway around the side and decided it could wait till morning, and I laughed at myself, feeling like a little kid, and here I was a grown woman, so scared of the dark.

The flashlight battery flickered and died about ten minutes later, so I had to keep opening and closing my cell phone just long enough to cast an eerie blue-green light over everything I needed. I pulled an old blanket over the mattress in my old bedroom, the smallest room with the peeling, pink striped wallpaper, then locked the front door and double-checked the lock on the back, and went to sleep. 

Currently Reading Petersburg By Andrei Bely see related

Been a while, crocodile

Nightswimming

            We crept through the woods, our bare feet moving noiselessly across patches of moss, patties of mud. It was like flying, Janet and I, at twilight, the way the wind pushed us back up the incline, suspended us, caught our words in our mouths. Ducking branches and boughs, wearing only blankets, the sound of our pitchy laughter echoing back up the hill to the house, we thought only of the lake, of our precious summer moments caught still, like honey bees in amber.

            The lake at last. The surface black in the dark, like so much tar, the glass reflection of trees and sky, vast, empty, full of stars.

            “Ready?” asked Janet, tugging her blanket taught around her thin shoulders.

            “Ready.”

            We dropped our modesty to the ground in a heap and ran, me first, Janet trailing, sprinting, panting, out of breath into the water, our eyes closed to keep from seeing one another. No looking: a pact, our sisterhood. This was our promise of nightswimming.

            The water is cold at night, even in summer. You have to run in or you start back, deterred. You can’t nightswim in layers, the way some people enter the ocean, sectioning their bodies—toes then feet then knees, pelvis, belly button, nipples, collarbone. Old women, you see sometimes, leaning in arms first, as though entering an embrace, but then they pull back at the last second, break the surface like a yolk, and rub their shoulders and arms down.

            Nightswimming, the water curls around you, clinging to you the way wet clothing does. It’s freeing in there, nothing between you and it, icy, crystal, beautiful. Nightswimming, it’s like being buried in a snowdrift.

            Janet struggles, a wounded animal. Her leg hasn’t been right since May, since the accident with the horses. She dragged near a city block, her foot tangled in the stirrup. She breathes deep, filling her lungs, making herself a buoy. I can feel the rivulets from her kicking creep up my ankles and thighs; it’s erratic, the tide ebbs more than flows. She’s breathing hard, like an asthma.

            “You okay?” I say the words gently, afraid to break something in the darkness.

            “Fine.” She gasps the word.

            Janet is treading water ferociously. Her arms move towards and away from her body like great wings.

            “Want to get out?”

            “Not if you don’t.”

            She is headstrong, Janet. She’d sooner drown than stop.

            I don’t want to leave yet. I dive under, and in the cold, it feels like I may never breathe again. I’m weightless, there, and the water’s holding me up, carrying me on its back. I feel something by my leg, a fish, maybe a large-mouth bass like Dad stalks after with his tackle box, shiny lures covered in neon fur, doused with fishsmell.

            When I come up, the air tastes like lake, damp the way the algae and tree stumps smell in the spring, when the snow melts and everything is almost rotted. It tastes like dying, wet wood.

            Janet’s raising her chin up to keep above the water. I know the sign, now. I can see it’s time to go, that she needs to get out or her leg’ll cramp. The first nightswimming, she nearly drowned, going under. I had to tug her back to shore on her back, floating, her knees and breasts cresting, breaking the surface.

            “I’m cold,” I say, and I fake a shiver.

I am cold, but cold in the way I need to be. Out in the summer sun, it almost feels like you’ll never get cool enough. In the house, with only the kitchen fan whirling, everything sticks to me, wet with sweat. The floorboards sweat a dew of their own; the unpolished wood on the handrail to the stairs is so soft you can scrape it off on your fingernail. In the water, I feel clean.

            “Oh,” Janet says, “Do you want to go back?”

            She tries to stifle the relief in her voice.

            “Yes,” I say, and she gratefully turns and starts for the shore.

            When you get out, any wind, the tiniest breeze is like ice. We throw our blankets around each other, not looking up until we’re covered.

            “That was a good one,” I say. Janet nods.

            We sit on the porch swing, our wet hair dripping onto the fabric. There’s a blanket over our knees. The summer nights are freezing after 1. We look through the mosquito netting, watching one after another as they get fried alive by the blue-light zapper. The noise they make, an electric crackle, like something struck by lighting, it goes through me.

            “I think I can hear them screaming.”

            “Weirdo,” Janet says, and pulls her long, dark hair over her shoulder. She twirls it round and round in her fingers, making a long tube of it.

            “Whatever.”

            “Wanna go again tomorrow?”

            “You sure you’re up for it? How’s your leg feel?”

            “It’s fine. God, stop asking about it.”

            “I just feel bad.”

            “Well don’t. Whatever. I’ll get the skin surgery soon and then it won’t look so weird. It doesn’t hurt that much. I hate when people ask.”

            “But we’re best friends.”

            “Some stuff’s just mine, you know?”

            “Sorry.”

            I pull my hair into my mouth. It hardly reaches, it’s so short. Nothing like Janet’s, but how I wish it were. I suck the water onto my tongue, cold.

            “Janet?”

            “Yeah?”

            “I’m glad we’re friends.”

            “Me too, Meg.”

Sometimes, I don’t think she is.

            At the pool the next day, Janet lies out in the sun. She tans so easy, her skin turns coffee brown in just a week. I slather on sunblock, gobs and globs of it, until my skin is oily and any perspiration beads around each pore.

            “Why do you always put so much on? I never put any on.”

            “I burn easy.”

            Janet examines her arms and legs, appraising their progress. 

            “I’m so white,” she says, even though she is already three or four shades past me.

            She rolls onto her stomach and reads a magazine. Every now and then she’ll pull her hair back, run her fingers through the top of her head and turn the whole mane over, like kneading dough. She told me once it’s her way of getting a boy to notice her.

            I look at the back of her leg, still scabbed over in places, from the accident. The skin is patchy where it’s healed, light pink and white, and coppery brown in the spots that tanned. The worst part is long white scar from where they operated on her knee. It’s cut across the back and up the side of her thigh. Every night, she rubs cocoa butter on it, to help the scar. We both know it’s a kind of placebo. Every few days she’ll look at it and say she thinks it’s gotten lighter in places, but it hasn’t.

            This scar, it makes me feel good. I don’t have what Janet has, but I have my leg, whole. Solid. Janet can’t walk more than a mile and a half without feeling it there. Whenever it rains, she stays in bed. She says she feels like it’s missing, the whole knee, intact, somewhere outside of her.

            In a little while, Janet gets up and pulls on a pair of capris. She doesn’t wear shorts anymore because you can always see the scar that way.

            “I’m getting some soft serve. You want?”

            I look at her stomach, the way it goes down flat into the hem of her pants.

            “No, thanks,” I say, and when she’s gone, I stretch myself out on the beach chair, and suck in my gut. When I’m lying down flat on my back, I don’t feel as heavy.

            I see her coming back across the way. There are two guys with her, one I’ve seen before, Travis, and some new guy. I tug on my jeans and sweatshirt, trying to masquerade.

            “You’re dressed warm,” Janet says.

            “I got cold.” I am sweating beneath my clothes and swearing at myself for not dieting better.

            “This is Meg,” she says to the boys. “Meg, Travis and Austin.”

            “Hey,” I say.

            “Hi,” they say with one voice, a chorus.

            They spend the afternoon with us. Travis sits on the grass and smokes. He aims his ash at ants. I tell him stop, he’ll kill them. He says that’s the idea.

            Austin is nicer. His family just moved here from Scranton, twenty minutes away. Their house is off Deer Kill Road, across the lake from us.  He’s a quiet, shy kind of guy. His eyes crinkle a little when he smiles, and he never laughs outright, not once all afternoon, he just sort of passes air through his grinning teeth, so low you can miss it if you’re not paying attention. He’s beautiful when he presses his lips together. Janet keeps looking at him with her starving eyes.

            Later, at Janet’s house, we sit at the kitchen table waiting for our nails to dry. I never painted my nails before her. Before her, I’d spend summers on the couch, waiting for it to get dark enough to go to sleep. Sometimes I’d read, go to the beach, write some dumb poetry, maybe. I never cared how I looked; now it’s all I do.

            Janet’s parents were really lucky to get the Todd house for the summer. My parents bought ours years ago, when I was little. The Todds got theirs around the same time, but they were older already, and now they’re so rickety it’s work for them to get up here to relax. They rent it out every year. Usually it goes towards the end of February. The community’s managers send updates to all the owners every month in a newsletter about what’s been taken and how much the others are going for. This year, the Todd property got off the list at the end of January, then got back on mid-April; someone couldn’t pay, or changed their mind. Janet told me she was supposed to go to riding camp, but couldn’t since the fall. That’s why they were looking for a place up here and got the house. Lucky thing.

            “I’m taking Austin tonight.”

            She said it suddenly. I smeared my polish across my thumb.

            “Taking him where?” I ask, though I know where and I’ve always known this day might come.   

“To the lake. Tonight.” The words sting me. My chest feels tighter; it hurts so much and I’m not sure why.

“But that’s our thing.”

            “It’s just something we do, it’s not a thing.”

            “It’s our thing. You said it was the first time.”

            “Yeah, it’s something I do with my friends, and now Austin’s my friend, too.”

            I was angry. I started peeling the half-dry polish off of my nails and rolling it into balls and tossing it on her kitchen floor.

            “I saved your life out there, Janet. But if you don’t care about being my friend, you don’t have to pretend. I’m not a charity case.”

            It just came out, what I’d been thinking all summer. I said it so calmly, my voice was so even I hardly recognized it.

It was the brave, stupid thing to say. I’d never had a friend like Janet before, and I probably never would again. Someone pretty and popular, someone boys wanted to be around. She didn’t need me like I needed her. I needed her to feel myself. I was her charity case, I was. Without her, I felt like her knee in a storm, like I wasn’t there.

The years before Janet, I didn’t go to the pool because I didn’t want people to see me in a swimsuit. I never talked to the guys at the lakefront beach, except maybe a lifeguard, to ask when the pool closed. I was a shadow. When people looked me in the eyes, I looked away. I didn’t understand why Janet was friends with me. I wasn’t her kind. Janet had a face you remembered.

            “Jeeze, Meg don’t get so worked up. God. If you don’t want to come, don’t come. I was gunna set you up with Travis.”

            “I don’t like Travis.”

            “Well he’s not my type. Austin is. I already told him. We’re meeting tonight.”

            “So, what, you’re only friends with me until someone better comes along? Now you’ll go nightswimming with Austin every night instead?”

            “God, Meg, how old are you? Just call it what it is. Skinny dipping. You’re not the only one that does it.”

            “I am here.”

            “Get serious. The Macabe boys’ve been taking girls out to Leitman’s Warf four summers in a row now.”

            “Who’re the Macabe boys?”

            “They live down on Waterway.”

            “Whatever. Janet, it’s our thing. Call it whatever you want, we’ve been doing it all summer.”

            “Listen to yourself. We’re not dating. God, I swear, sometimes it’s like you’re in love with me.”

            I bit my lip.

            “I like boys. You’re being a jerk.”

            I did like boys. I just liked Janet, too. Not like I wanted to kiss her or anything, but sometimes, at night, the way a blanket wrapped round her knees, or how her hair looked in one long braid, like a rope, it was just nice. I wanted that for me, not her, but the way she was. Like her smell after the water, always dirtier, somehow, than before. It would mix with her shampoo, the lake essence, and she’d emerge transformed, some entanglement of sweet and sweat and salt and seaweed, even though it was freshwater.

Always, Janet looked smooth, like she’d be soft to touch. She looked like a girl in a magazine, except her leg. I wanted to be around her because I felt like I mattered then, with her.

            “Look, fine, don’t come. I won’t do any of our stuff with him. We probably won’t be able to, anyway. I’m meeting him in the middle.”

            “In the middle of where?”

            “The lake. Are you slow or something?” She rolled her eyes at me. I felt small.

            “No. Why would you meet in the middle?”

            “He can’t drive here. He’s got the permit since he’s sixteen, but you can’t drive after dark.”

            “Can’t he walk?”

            “He lives right across. I told him we’d swim to the middle. It’s easier that way.”

            “What about your leg?”

            “Shut up about my leg. I already told you, it’s fine.” She said it through her teeth.

            “Fine, then,” I said. “Go.”

            “You’re not coming?”

            “No.”

            That night, I stared at my ceiling. There was a place that always leaked. You could tell from the yellow rings of the stain how many floods we’d had since the roofing got damaged. Like tree rings.

            Janet called at eleven.

            “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

            She didn’t sound like she wanted me to.

            “I’m sure.”

            “Suit yourself.”

            I knew she was going at midnight. After she called, I spent time wondering why she had. I didn’t think a girl like Janet could care—really care—about a girl like me. She was out of my league.

            I spent time crying about how a boy like Austin, would never look at a girl like me if I wasn’t with a girl like Janet. And about how if a girl like Janet was around, even a boy like Trent, a seedy, druggie kid in torn jeans, wouldn’t look at me, either.

            I thought about how I was going to break off with Janet. I thought I’d maybe say, “I don’t think you care about me,” or maybe, if I were braver, “I don’t care about you.”

Maybe I’d tell her she couldn’t treat people like collector’s items. Maybe I’d say I knew she only hung around me because there was no one else—everyone else was either too young or too old. Maybe I’d say I hated her. Maybe I’d be honest and say I was jealous.

            While I brushed my teeth, I thought about the good things about Janet, how she was always graceful, always up for an adventure. How she talked to people, always nodding like she was really listening to you, and smiling. I thought about how she could just put her hand on your arm, like she really understood, and about how comforting that was, to be understood that way.

            I got into bed wishing that I’d gone with her, wishing that I’d never made her think I was in love with her, because I wasn’t, not with her, just with the idea of being like her.

In bed, I heard a crack like something falling through a canopy of branches, and then, the sound of rain.

By the time I’d run out to the lake, it was pouring down in fistfulls. I was soaked through. My sweatshirt and jeans clung to me like a body. 

Through the rain, I could make out a heap of clothes. She hadn’t brought a blanket after all; she’d done it differently. Some things, maybe, she could feel.

I looked for her across the lake. It was hard, now, because the rain broke the surface into a million pieces. I could see across it, to where Austin lived, but it looked so much closer than it was; it’s forever away swimming. I rowed across once in a fishing boat, to get live bait, and didn’t have the strength to row back.

I wasn’t thinking. I should have taken off the wet clothes, but I just pulled off my sneakers and socks, and lined them up on shore, looking out the whole while, scanning to see if I could find her.

When I dove in, my clothes weighed down on me like chains, sinking me down. It was icy below, but the rain, warm, hot drops, covered my face and hair. I couldn’t see through it, nearly.

“Janet!” I yelled. The sound of the water splashing against itself cracked in two.

No one answered. I swam further out, towards the middle, towards a light in a house on the other side, blurred from the wetness like a watercolor.

“Janet!?”

I kept swimming. My jeans pulled down and it was getting harder. I kicked and tried to undo them, but the zipper stuck. I dragged them after me.

“Austin! Janet!”

I thought I saw something across the way, maybe, I hoped I had.

“JANET!”

            I swam in a circle around myself, trying to look in every direction at once. The trees around the lake, so tall, thin, wiry, made it too dark to see anything on shore. I thought I saw something move once on land, but between the rain and the tugging down, and swimming to stay up, and the lightning, and the trees, I couldn’t be sure. I was panting then, and my heart was pounding. I wasn’t light anymore; I was heavier than ever, wet jean dragging like a titanic corpse. There was a fallen tree in the water feet away, reaching out to me with its many limbs. I swam towards it, desperately, trying to stay afloat. Soon, I could feel the branches with my fingertips.

The air smelled so sweet suddenly. Lightning lit up the sky like a million bulbs, like midday. All around me, the light shone back from the black surface.

In the darkness, in the lake, I felt myself go numb. I couldn’t feel any more, but I felt everything. Everything looked bright, red, like police lights. They flashed around and around like some arcade game. I kept breathing but everything in my body was freezing and burning. Hot ice in my head. I could feel my hair on fire. My eyelashes hurt. The rain, it burned like acid. I tried to dive under but couldn’t use my body. My arms felt like weights, heavy, dull, and I started to sink. The clothes were pulling me down but no, that wasn’t it, it was the water rising, opening, holding me, pulling me. I tried to lie on my back, float if I could, but everything was red in the moonlight, the water around me swirled and twisted; I could see it rope together like one of Janet’s braids.

And I went down, down, to my chin, almost my nose, my eyes, the layers no one passes when they walk into the ocean.

Dear Xanga

Dear Xanga