Thumbing My Way Into North Carolina
The concert is fresh in my head, and I feel like I slept with a smile plastered on my face. It’s morning, the same feeling I get before camping with my sister races through me. I’m sitting on the cool tiles of his shower with his head in my lap. He has a headache and my heart goes out to him for it, so I try to help. It is perhaps less than practical, but I find it enjoyable. While he rests I run fingers through his damp hair and admire his body and the way the water splashes down his skin. I’m doing the thing I love and hate to do, memorizing a moment because I’m never sure if I’ll get another. Even here, a thousand miles away and in a completely different world from my last relationships I still hear that whisper. “What if, hear me out Jules, what if he just stops caring?” I won’t even give voice to the idea that the heart I can feel beating in his neck might stop.
That’s kind of always been my struggle and why I feel like Persephone. A mash up of life and death, of half living in the sun and half in the underworld. One part of me is always soaking up the great joys of life, and the other half watches them turn into memories moments after they happen, lamenting that time marches on, becoming the guide to the place where memories go to live forever in the corners of my heart.
He’s in here now, taking up residence next to memories of being in the back of my brother’s pick up truck, screaming down back roads with the bright moon overhead, the wind whipping my hair and howling with a bunch of wild rednecks at our reckless abandon of sense. Next to the burning flame of laying on the dock at the cabin in the night, gazing up into more stars than have a right to exist, feeling like I’m going to fall right off the face of the planet and float forever among them.
When I walk down the halls of my heart, he’s here. And this weekend hasn’t even begun. Already I feel the space in my heart preparing to open, to hold what will happen, to capture it in the bittersweet taste of pain that comes with moments so perfect they can’t last.
The morning is a little blurry, but while we’re all up and packing, I catch it. The first use of “The truck”. Someone is determining how things will be transported, but it was a clear shot like a bolt from a crossbow across my soul. Not Jewel’s truck, not Big Red. The truck. It’s so casual, so easy, so perfect. For one hot second I’m unable to breathe. It implies that they see it as theirs, that it needs no descriptor. It needs to explanation, and it needs no qualifier. There is only one truck, and right now it’s everyone’s.
But time doesn’t stop and my breath comes back. I’m getting a few things sorted in the truck when I catch the middle child lingering by the tailgate, staring at the truck with a backpack in his hands. He catches me looking and drops his gaze. His older cousin asks what’s wrong, but he shrugs and asks which car he’s going in, he has his little brother’s things that need to go in. I see it then, plain as day. “In N’s car.” He slowly turns and I rest my arm on the tailgate. “Did you want to ride in the truck?” Bingo. He whirls for a second and looks as if maybe I’m teasing him. I had that same look as a kid, always wanting to be in the fun new thing. Forever being just a little too young. Forever being the middle child.
“If your sister and your cousin are cool with it, you can ride with us. They’re the ones sharing the back seat with you.” Of course they’re cool with it, but he wastes absolutely no time in asking. I don’t think it took any longer for him to grab his stuff an have it neatly placed on the back seat, and my amusement rose. Hello, kiddo, I think I found our connection. Fellow middle child, I see you.
As we all climb in to the truck my heart sings. This is why I bought a truck, this is why I splurged for the crew cab. This is why. Before I ever knew them or ever even dreamed they could exist, I felt the need to buy this monster. We had been walking across the lot, kicking tires, test driving others and I looked over and saw her wedged in a row. That flash was all it took. That split second when I gasped and Matt laughed at me, because he knew we were going home with that truck. And now, now she was filled with life.
There are windy roads and highways, there’s traffic and empty fields. There’s talk, and there’s laughter, and there’s life. It takes us nearly four hours, and in the end it was only G and I awake, talking and figuring out the GPS directions. For having just learned of the lifestyle and then spending a lot of time in a vehicle with me, he’s very relaxed and chatty. I can appreciate how open he is to me for how intimidating the entire situation could be.
And now, to camp. There are two things I don’t take lightly in this world. Disney and camping. We pulled up on this camp ground that was full of good Christian ideology. No swearing, no PDAs, and no blashphemy. Within minutes the kids were running around yelling “Violation!” And giving air hugs. The WiFi was called “Jesus Loves You”. I hope so because he’s about to see my entire browsing history and Fetlife profile.
It was time to show them how I roll. G and I teamed up and had my tent set in record time. To be fair, I’ve raised it and it’s twin so many times in the rain, the dark and the heat that it’s not even a task anymore. Hands on hips, we stood back and chuckled. Job well done, team work accomplished, party tent ready. And then I grabbed my air mattress. Oh my gosh, if I had known how popular that made me, I’d have brought all three. Blown up, sheets on and sleeping bag laid out, it became the physical embodiment of why every camping trip with me is a holiday. We waited out the rain in the tent and I let my mind wander to the future. Another camping trip, I’d show them how I really camp. This is just the abridged version.
“I picked the right partner,” he says. I might as well get that tattooed on my upper arm.
It’s turning twilight now, the rain ended a while ago and left everything damp and muddy. ‘It builds character’ my dad tells my seven year old self when I’m holding my foot up in a jelly sandal and complaining. Now this fresh batch of children hear these same words and I’m pleased the torture of my youth finds new targets. Heaven knows my nieces would be rolling their eyes that Auntie Jewel imparts her maddening wisdom on new ears. I can hear them sighing in my head.
Will they in turn tell a new generation down the road and remember me? I have no children to carry any of this on. Will these things die with me? I’ve spent sleepless nights wondering what will happen to my memory when I go. The only comfort I find is that pieces of me will exist in others, even if they don’t know where those pieces came from. Several children suffering through discomfort, building character while their parents laugh and vaguely recall a red truck and rain.
The campfire is going with generous help of lighter fluid. My sister is in my head now, pride beaming on her face that she can start a fire with one single kitchen match and a little tinder. My dad can do it with a single matchbook match. I myself subscribe to lighters and paper. God did not invent these hands for manual labor like that.
Darker yet, and the glow sticks come out with the sauce. There’s music, there’s dancing. There are Power Keys and wild happiness. It’s fun, it’s joyful, but on the edges of my energy I can feel it. That creeping exhaustion I’ve been staving off for months. It can’t touch me yet, but it’s hovering, waiting for the moment it can strike. The alcohol keeps things going for me, and after a little while I’m looking up at N’s face. He’s got an arm around me, squeezing me against him and laughing. It’s easy, he’s flirting and genuinely hoping I’m having a good time. I lose track of time, and suddenly I realize N has gone. Did I push him away by focusing on someone else? He had asked me something and I think he had wanted a different answer, but I can’t recall. I’m tired now, and getting a little cold.
I stumble to the tent, switching to pajamas, intending to sit for a moment. I know it felt nice and I laid back... and then he’s there and I understand that I must have fallen asleep. So easy, so quick. He curls me up into him, and whispers while everyone else sorts themselves into sleeping on the floor of the tent. We’re split in the tents as we had been in the vehicles with a friend sharing the other tent.
He asks if I’m alright, if I’m happy. What did I say? What prompted the next thing to come out of his mouth? I don’t recall. Only that I felt it sing up my spine and explode in my brain when he says I am a part of his family. Ohana.
“What?”
What? Am I so buzzed I heard him wrong? Does he know what that word means to me? How much my soul aches for that? I haven’t allowed myself to even dream of that, to want it on a conscious level. I almost had it so many times only for it to be pulled away. There is a scar on my heart, in my body, where I failed to protect the only child I’ve carried. Where a monster who lived in my bed ripped her from me and I could not stop him. Since then I have been Llarona. I have been sure that my legacy will be near chances at having the family I grew up with.
We were six strong. Mashed up of previous marriages and current love. We never used “half” or “step”, we just showed up like an army and dominated whatever party we went to. I am Five of Six. A middle child in a sea of middle children. The Most Hated for being the first of my mom and dad after their divorces. The Most Brilliant for needing to stand out. The first to graduate high school without needing a tutor, summer school or special consideration. The first to be offered to graduate early despite the initial difficulties I fought in grade school. The first to be in sports, band and clubs. The first to be straight laced and high achieving.
We would pile into the van, the back of dad’s truck, or the trailer lined with hay, fighting for pecking order, for prestige for the front seat or a widow, for some shred of identity that couldn’t be squelched. But there was a deep understanding amid the jostling. No one fucked with us. You mess with one, you mess with all, and we could turn from squabbling chickens to a herd of velociraptors in half a second. Fine tuned, well-trained hunters with a pack mentality and family honor above all. I think my dad to this day considers that a good consolation prize for not having his Partridge Family dream.
Eat shit, Tracy Partridge, I had five confirmed kills while you were jangling your little tambourine.
Anyway, here I am, in a tent, a thousand miles away and decades down the line. One of us is dead half as long as he was alive. All of us bear scars of hard lives. We haven’t been that family in so long that even the memories are warped and faded like old polaroids. We will always have those bonds, but life carried us away on different currents. The sadness of it will always haunt me. There’s always a spark of it when I return to my homeland. When we’re together, almost all of us, and the laughter ignites as though it was never gone.
And he says I am a part of this family. I see pieces of me, of my siblings, of my own family like a shattered mirror reflecting my own gaze back at me from inside these tiny people. From inside this husband and wife team who let me in and opened me up. From inside a cousin who didn’t have to care. How do I react to that? How did I? Thank god it was dark.
Does he know he does this to me? That his words are reaching back into my past, over countless years of putting a dream away and pulling them out? That he is “Kali Ma”ing my heart so I can watch it beat while he runs his hands over old scars and fresh wounds and pours gold into them so they become art. They become something altogether new. How does he know without me saying a word where to touch, where to caress, and where to disarm?
I want it so much to be real.
I’m terrified by Christmas it will evaporate. How do you hold on to smoke? To water? How do you lift a trembling hand to love and trust it will be there when so many times it had dried up despite every effort to hold it? How do you breath when this love is grabbing hold of every painful, sad, bitter part of you and coaxing you to dream. To wish. To believe that finally, finally you have found what everything in your life pointed you toward? It’s more than I can dissect in an hour, a day, a week, a month.
Will I be regretting this in the cold winds of December? Will there be gifts with their names on them under my tree instead? They are in here too. In these halls. I can feel them, can feel the places they can grow and take root. I can feel the tendrils that have already sprouted.
***
Dawn has broken. The guys go off to river kayaking, and I’m sitting around the empty fire ring. I’ve put K and Z to sleep on my air mattress, finding that ever ready piece of me that wants to love children using my hands to help them in and tuck them in. In the quiet hours I enjoy talking with S, nibbling breakfast and soaking up a camp morning. This is the precursor to my September.
When it’s time to roust Z and K, it’s to laughter when I pull the plug and the bed deflates. At least until they’re flailing at each other.
She’s taking care of her children, and her friend is entertaining the youngest. Again I’m struck by the easiness. I can watch her, watch them, and feel how dear they are becoming to me. They are mine in a way no one else has been before. Matt came to me alone, with a mother, father and brother he has but is not close with. Here is a family, a group, and I want to protect them as much as join them.
After breakfast we decide to swim. My favorite element of placid water. I start on the dock, my legs in, enjoying the coolness in the building heat of the day. Do I dare go in? The bottom is a mystery, unseeable. Once again I’m reminded of how spoiled I am by my lake, it’s perfect sand bottom and endlessly clear water making visibility beneath a boat clear for hundreds of feet below any boat or kayak. But I need to swim, I need the water to pour out my emotions that are filling me up.
In I go, sinking to the murky bottom. What’s in here with me? What could be lurking?
I surface and there’s a toddler paddling to me. R wants to go to the platform with the big slide, will I take him? I remember my niecling at this age, struggling to swim and keep up with an auntie that’s secretly a siren and made for water. But this child is like me. A strong swimmer, undaunted by distance. I stay with him but he needs no help. I admire him, and my three year old self would have been the same. He climbs up, climbs the ladder and slides down into the water in a comical splash. Fearless.
After a couple of times it becomes clear that he’s definitely part fish, and I float out to relax with half an ear on the platform. Stretching out in the water feels good. I can find myself here. My toes break the surface and I stare off at the tree line, echoes of my homeland in my head. I let my heart bleed out into the water. The sun is beating down, sparking on the little ripples my arms make, nearly blinding me and transporting me to a deeper place in my mind.
“Miss Julie!” I lift my head up. Z is on the platform and laughing, wanting me to watch him jump in. R is playing nicely with older kids, one of whom jumps into the water near me and asks if he’s my son. “No,” I say. “Just a friend.” He smiles and says R is cute and feisty. He is. A thousand thoughts crowd my mind. I’m considering all the things that family implies when I catch a tiny form falling from the slide and landing with a hard smack on the platform.
I scrambled up the ladder while every other child in the water paused and watched. He has gotten up, and while he’s distressed, he’s not critically injured. I kneel and ask if I can look at his arm and he holds it out. I touch it gingerly. “Does this hurt?” No. I poke his upper arm gently. “Here?” No. I poke his tummy and he cracks a grin. “Here?” No! And off he runs to jump in the water.
K has come up to the platform in her kayak now, Z and his friends back to playing in the water. She crawls out and we sit together, laughing that he’s unstoppable. I’m just happy he’s not damaged, and after a while we decide to swim back to S laying on the dock. It’s time to return to camp, to break it down and end the trip.
The guys return, sore, tired and happy with stories of falling out into the water. Within a couple of hours everything is packed up again and we’re on the road. We got lost trying to get off the mountain. The first time Waze has ever failed to find the fastest way out. It was still amusing and we eventually made our way to the highway again.
A stop at a joint KFC/Taco Bell found me with weak knees. I caught our reflections in the window walking across the lot and my breath caught. Was that really me? Was I really walking in to this place so comfortably with this family as though I might have always been there? That I always would be?
We’re at a high top table and Z is sitting next to me. G is across. Z is eating a cookie at the end of the meal, something G gave him. Earlier while packing up I’d seen him walk up to the truck and pet her, calling her Big Red affectionately. Yes, he’s trying to reach out too. The tendrils in my heart wind tighter when he peers up at me, chocolate on his face, looking so happy that he got picked to be here. I can recognize that, I feel it too. We’ve both been picked for this. Two middle kids staring at each other in this place, just happy to be there.
G takes shotgun while the backseat passes out. We’re driving down long roads, passing clouds and talking easily. It’s soothing. I could do this for hours. Every glimpse in the rear view shows me relaxed faces, calm in sleep. I would drive hundreds of hours to see them this way. But my energy wears thin and he’s awake enough to drive. We switch, and I’m riding shotgun, my mind floating over the road ahead of us. Does it have to end? Can’t the road just go on and on this way?
But it must end, and the party divides. G goes home, S and N go off to N’s place. It’s over now, but the facebook group chat lives on. It’s as though we’re still at the camp in it. I never want it to go away.
I stay the night. There’s still so much on my mind. There will be for a while. It all feels real. It feels solid. Do I let myself want it? Do I let myself fall in the only real place I have left to hurt? The place that has been closed to all since it became clear no more will I feel a second heartbeat in my body? To lose it after letting myself dream again would destroy me. I’d survive, but the scars there would run deeper than ever.
I look at him, leaning in to kiss me. I can feel the gold he’s poured into the wounds. I ask myself “Can I live with it if this all leaves tomorrow?” My heart answers. “You know you can, and we don’t let fear rule us any more.” And I opened myself up once more.
That’s kind of always been my struggle and why I feel like Persephone. A mash up of life and death, of half living in the sun and half in the underworld. One part of me is always soaking up the great joys of life, and the other half watches them turn into memories moments after they happen, lamenting that time marches on, becoming the guide to the place where memories go to live forever in the corners of my heart.
He’s in here now, taking up residence next to memories of being in the back of my brother’s pick up truck, screaming down back roads with the bright moon overhead, the wind whipping my hair and howling with a bunch of wild rednecks at our reckless abandon of sense. Next to the burning flame of laying on the dock at the cabin in the night, gazing up into more stars than have a right to exist, feeling like I’m going to fall right off the face of the planet and float forever among them.
When I walk down the halls of my heart, he’s here. And this weekend hasn’t even begun. Already I feel the space in my heart preparing to open, to hold what will happen, to capture it in the bittersweet taste of pain that comes with moments so perfect they can’t last.
The morning is a little blurry, but while we’re all up and packing, I catch it. The first use of “The truck”. Someone is determining how things will be transported, but it was a clear shot like a bolt from a crossbow across my soul. Not Jewel’s truck, not Big Red. The truck. It’s so casual, so easy, so perfect. For one hot second I’m unable to breathe. It implies that they see it as theirs, that it needs no descriptor. It needs to explanation, and it needs no qualifier. There is only one truck, and right now it’s everyone’s.
But time doesn’t stop and my breath comes back. I’m getting a few things sorted in the truck when I catch the middle child lingering by the tailgate, staring at the truck with a backpack in his hands. He catches me looking and drops his gaze. His older cousin asks what’s wrong, but he shrugs and asks which car he’s going in, he has his little brother’s things that need to go in. I see it then, plain as day. “In N’s car.” He slowly turns and I rest my arm on the tailgate. “Did you want to ride in the truck?” Bingo. He whirls for a second and looks as if maybe I’m teasing him. I had that same look as a kid, always wanting to be in the fun new thing. Forever being just a little too young. Forever being the middle child.
“If your sister and your cousin are cool with it, you can ride with us. They’re the ones sharing the back seat with you.” Of course they’re cool with it, but he wastes absolutely no time in asking. I don’t think it took any longer for him to grab his stuff an have it neatly placed on the back seat, and my amusement rose. Hello, kiddo, I think I found our connection. Fellow middle child, I see you.
As we all climb in to the truck my heart sings. This is why I bought a truck, this is why I splurged for the crew cab. This is why. Before I ever knew them or ever even dreamed they could exist, I felt the need to buy this monster. We had been walking across the lot, kicking tires, test driving others and I looked over and saw her wedged in a row. That flash was all it took. That split second when I gasped and Matt laughed at me, because he knew we were going home with that truck. And now, now she was filled with life.
There are windy roads and highways, there’s traffic and empty fields. There’s talk, and there’s laughter, and there’s life. It takes us nearly four hours, and in the end it was only G and I awake, talking and figuring out the GPS directions. For having just learned of the lifestyle and then spending a lot of time in a vehicle with me, he’s very relaxed and chatty. I can appreciate how open he is to me for how intimidating the entire situation could be.
And now, to camp. There are two things I don’t take lightly in this world. Disney and camping. We pulled up on this camp ground that was full of good Christian ideology. No swearing, no PDAs, and no blashphemy. Within minutes the kids were running around yelling “Violation!” And giving air hugs. The WiFi was called “Jesus Loves You”. I hope so because he’s about to see my entire browsing history and Fetlife profile.
It was time to show them how I roll. G and I teamed up and had my tent set in record time. To be fair, I’ve raised it and it’s twin so many times in the rain, the dark and the heat that it’s not even a task anymore. Hands on hips, we stood back and chuckled. Job well done, team work accomplished, party tent ready. And then I grabbed my air mattress. Oh my gosh, if I had known how popular that made me, I’d have brought all three. Blown up, sheets on and sleeping bag laid out, it became the physical embodiment of why every camping trip with me is a holiday. We waited out the rain in the tent and I let my mind wander to the future. Another camping trip, I’d show them how I really camp. This is just the abridged version.
“I picked the right partner,” he says. I might as well get that tattooed on my upper arm.
It’s turning twilight now, the rain ended a while ago and left everything damp and muddy. ‘It builds character’ my dad tells my seven year old self when I’m holding my foot up in a jelly sandal and complaining. Now this fresh batch of children hear these same words and I’m pleased the torture of my youth finds new targets. Heaven knows my nieces would be rolling their eyes that Auntie Jewel imparts her maddening wisdom on new ears. I can hear them sighing in my head.
Will they in turn tell a new generation down the road and remember me? I have no children to carry any of this on. Will these things die with me? I’ve spent sleepless nights wondering what will happen to my memory when I go. The only comfort I find is that pieces of me will exist in others, even if they don’t know where those pieces came from. Several children suffering through discomfort, building character while their parents laugh and vaguely recall a red truck and rain.
The campfire is going with generous help of lighter fluid. My sister is in my head now, pride beaming on her face that she can start a fire with one single kitchen match and a little tinder. My dad can do it with a single matchbook match. I myself subscribe to lighters and paper. God did not invent these hands for manual labor like that.
Darker yet, and the glow sticks come out with the sauce. There’s music, there’s dancing. There are Power Keys and wild happiness. It’s fun, it’s joyful, but on the edges of my energy I can feel it. That creeping exhaustion I’ve been staving off for months. It can’t touch me yet, but it’s hovering, waiting for the moment it can strike. The alcohol keeps things going for me, and after a little while I’m looking up at N’s face. He’s got an arm around me, squeezing me against him and laughing. It’s easy, he’s flirting and genuinely hoping I’m having a good time. I lose track of time, and suddenly I realize N has gone. Did I push him away by focusing on someone else? He had asked me something and I think he had wanted a different answer, but I can’t recall. I’m tired now, and getting a little cold.
I stumble to the tent, switching to pajamas, intending to sit for a moment. I know it felt nice and I laid back... and then he’s there and I understand that I must have fallen asleep. So easy, so quick. He curls me up into him, and whispers while everyone else sorts themselves into sleeping on the floor of the tent. We’re split in the tents as we had been in the vehicles with a friend sharing the other tent.
He asks if I’m alright, if I’m happy. What did I say? What prompted the next thing to come out of his mouth? I don’t recall. Only that I felt it sing up my spine and explode in my brain when he says I am a part of his family. Ohana.
“What?”
What? Am I so buzzed I heard him wrong? Does he know what that word means to me? How much my soul aches for that? I haven’t allowed myself to even dream of that, to want it on a conscious level. I almost had it so many times only for it to be pulled away. There is a scar on my heart, in my body, where I failed to protect the only child I’ve carried. Where a monster who lived in my bed ripped her from me and I could not stop him. Since then I have been Llarona. I have been sure that my legacy will be near chances at having the family I grew up with.
We were six strong. Mashed up of previous marriages and current love. We never used “half” or “step”, we just showed up like an army and dominated whatever party we went to. I am Five of Six. A middle child in a sea of middle children. The Most Hated for being the first of my mom and dad after their divorces. The Most Brilliant for needing to stand out. The first to graduate high school without needing a tutor, summer school or special consideration. The first to be offered to graduate early despite the initial difficulties I fought in grade school. The first to be in sports, band and clubs. The first to be straight laced and high achieving.
We would pile into the van, the back of dad’s truck, or the trailer lined with hay, fighting for pecking order, for prestige for the front seat or a widow, for some shred of identity that couldn’t be squelched. But there was a deep understanding amid the jostling. No one fucked with us. You mess with one, you mess with all, and we could turn from squabbling chickens to a herd of velociraptors in half a second. Fine tuned, well-trained hunters with a pack mentality and family honor above all. I think my dad to this day considers that a good consolation prize for not having his Partridge Family dream.
Eat shit, Tracy Partridge, I had five confirmed kills while you were jangling your little tambourine.
Anyway, here I am, in a tent, a thousand miles away and decades down the line. One of us is dead half as long as he was alive. All of us bear scars of hard lives. We haven’t been that family in so long that even the memories are warped and faded like old polaroids. We will always have those bonds, but life carried us away on different currents. The sadness of it will always haunt me. There’s always a spark of it when I return to my homeland. When we’re together, almost all of us, and the laughter ignites as though it was never gone.
And he says I am a part of this family. I see pieces of me, of my siblings, of my own family like a shattered mirror reflecting my own gaze back at me from inside these tiny people. From inside this husband and wife team who let me in and opened me up. From inside a cousin who didn’t have to care. How do I react to that? How did I? Thank god it was dark.
Does he know he does this to me? That his words are reaching back into my past, over countless years of putting a dream away and pulling them out? That he is “Kali Ma”ing my heart so I can watch it beat while he runs his hands over old scars and fresh wounds and pours gold into them so they become art. They become something altogether new. How does he know without me saying a word where to touch, where to caress, and where to disarm?
I want it so much to be real.
I’m terrified by Christmas it will evaporate. How do you hold on to smoke? To water? How do you lift a trembling hand to love and trust it will be there when so many times it had dried up despite every effort to hold it? How do you breath when this love is grabbing hold of every painful, sad, bitter part of you and coaxing you to dream. To wish. To believe that finally, finally you have found what everything in your life pointed you toward? It’s more than I can dissect in an hour, a day, a week, a month.
Will I be regretting this in the cold winds of December? Will there be gifts with their names on them under my tree instead? They are in here too. In these halls. I can feel them, can feel the places they can grow and take root. I can feel the tendrils that have already sprouted.
***
Dawn has broken. The guys go off to river kayaking, and I’m sitting around the empty fire ring. I’ve put K and Z to sleep on my air mattress, finding that ever ready piece of me that wants to love children using my hands to help them in and tuck them in. In the quiet hours I enjoy talking with S, nibbling breakfast and soaking up a camp morning. This is the precursor to my September.
When it’s time to roust Z and K, it’s to laughter when I pull the plug and the bed deflates. At least until they’re flailing at each other.
She’s taking care of her children, and her friend is entertaining the youngest. Again I’m struck by the easiness. I can watch her, watch them, and feel how dear they are becoming to me. They are mine in a way no one else has been before. Matt came to me alone, with a mother, father and brother he has but is not close with. Here is a family, a group, and I want to protect them as much as join them.
After breakfast we decide to swim. My favorite element of placid water. I start on the dock, my legs in, enjoying the coolness in the building heat of the day. Do I dare go in? The bottom is a mystery, unseeable. Once again I’m reminded of how spoiled I am by my lake, it’s perfect sand bottom and endlessly clear water making visibility beneath a boat clear for hundreds of feet below any boat or kayak. But I need to swim, I need the water to pour out my emotions that are filling me up.
In I go, sinking to the murky bottom. What’s in here with me? What could be lurking?
I surface and there’s a toddler paddling to me. R wants to go to the platform with the big slide, will I take him? I remember my niecling at this age, struggling to swim and keep up with an auntie that’s secretly a siren and made for water. But this child is like me. A strong swimmer, undaunted by distance. I stay with him but he needs no help. I admire him, and my three year old self would have been the same. He climbs up, climbs the ladder and slides down into the water in a comical splash. Fearless.
After a couple of times it becomes clear that he’s definitely part fish, and I float out to relax with half an ear on the platform. Stretching out in the water feels good. I can find myself here. My toes break the surface and I stare off at the tree line, echoes of my homeland in my head. I let my heart bleed out into the water. The sun is beating down, sparking on the little ripples my arms make, nearly blinding me and transporting me to a deeper place in my mind.
“Miss Julie!” I lift my head up. Z is on the platform and laughing, wanting me to watch him jump in. R is playing nicely with older kids, one of whom jumps into the water near me and asks if he’s my son. “No,” I say. “Just a friend.” He smiles and says R is cute and feisty. He is. A thousand thoughts crowd my mind. I’m considering all the things that family implies when I catch a tiny form falling from the slide and landing with a hard smack on the platform.
I scrambled up the ladder while every other child in the water paused and watched. He has gotten up, and while he’s distressed, he’s not critically injured. I kneel and ask if I can look at his arm and he holds it out. I touch it gingerly. “Does this hurt?” No. I poke his upper arm gently. “Here?” No. I poke his tummy and he cracks a grin. “Here?” No! And off he runs to jump in the water.
K has come up to the platform in her kayak now, Z and his friends back to playing in the water. She crawls out and we sit together, laughing that he’s unstoppable. I’m just happy he’s not damaged, and after a while we decide to swim back to S laying on the dock. It’s time to return to camp, to break it down and end the trip.
The guys return, sore, tired and happy with stories of falling out into the water. Within a couple of hours everything is packed up again and we’re on the road. We got lost trying to get off the mountain. The first time Waze has ever failed to find the fastest way out. It was still amusing and we eventually made our way to the highway again.
A stop at a joint KFC/Taco Bell found me with weak knees. I caught our reflections in the window walking across the lot and my breath caught. Was that really me? Was I really walking in to this place so comfortably with this family as though I might have always been there? That I always would be?
We’re at a high top table and Z is sitting next to me. G is across. Z is eating a cookie at the end of the meal, something G gave him. Earlier while packing up I’d seen him walk up to the truck and pet her, calling her Big Red affectionately. Yes, he’s trying to reach out too. The tendrils in my heart wind tighter when he peers up at me, chocolate on his face, looking so happy that he got picked to be here. I can recognize that, I feel it too. We’ve both been picked for this. Two middle kids staring at each other in this place, just happy to be there.
G takes shotgun while the backseat passes out. We’re driving down long roads, passing clouds and talking easily. It’s soothing. I could do this for hours. Every glimpse in the rear view shows me relaxed faces, calm in sleep. I would drive hundreds of hours to see them this way. But my energy wears thin and he’s awake enough to drive. We switch, and I’m riding shotgun, my mind floating over the road ahead of us. Does it have to end? Can’t the road just go on and on this way?
But it must end, and the party divides. G goes home, S and N go off to N’s place. It’s over now, but the facebook group chat lives on. It’s as though we’re still at the camp in it. I never want it to go away.
I stay the night. There’s still so much on my mind. There will be for a while. It all feels real. It feels solid. Do I let myself want it? Do I let myself fall in the only real place I have left to hurt? The place that has been closed to all since it became clear no more will I feel a second heartbeat in my body? To lose it after letting myself dream again would destroy me. I’d survive, but the scars there would run deeper than ever.
I look at him, leaning in to kiss me. I can feel the gold he’s poured into the wounds. I ask myself “Can I live with it if this all leaves tomorrow?” My heart answers. “You know you can, and we don’t let fear rule us any more.” And I opened myself up once more.
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