twenty-four

If you’ve been keeping up, you know my obsession with water: my desire to be in any body of water that lies before me. Baker Lake was no exception.

The chilly day broke with the treeline into the expanse of calm water, barely rippling on the surface. The shoreline was warm, shallowed by small stones. I couldn’t resist.

Three of us went in. We walked slowly, expecting a steep drop into treading water, but it didn’t happen. Fifty feet across the lake, we were still only in to our waists. I sunk under, waving my torso like a mermaid and gasping for air at the surface: the shock of cold was sobering and tight in the lungs.

I started full-out swimming. Stroke, stroke, stand. I was testing the depth, but even so far out that my friends were unrecognizable on shore, I could still stand with my head fully above-water. I later learned it was a man-made lake, which may have been some explanation, but all of this is beside the point.

The point is that it was beautiful. The Northern Cascades echoed the cloudy sky with clumps of snow, as if a wrinkled sheet had been tossed over the varying degrees of blue water, blue mountain silhouettes, and never-ending blue atmosphere.

Floating on my back, I closed my eyes. Silence. Ultimate silence, not even waves lapping or birds crying. The mountains seemed to bellow a deep but silent hum like a wavering subwoofer, waiting for a boom. I opened my eyes and looked around. This is what it means to be in it.

“AYIYIYIYI!!!” I shouted in a screech. It echoed between the trees, and the hills sang it right back to me.

Solitude.

Such silence and peace – no worry – left my mind to wander. I mostly thought of how I got to this place, how I never knew it existed before, and how I would soon have to leave and go back to the chaos of city and work and stress.

Where was I a year ago today? Two years ago? I remember them both clearly. I was celebrating. Celebrating the life of my best friend. Last year and this year, the celebration is bittersweet: I grieve as well. He would be twenty-four today.

22nd Birthday, 2011 Joe's Crab Shack

I spent a good part of the evening, only past dark, imagining that he was with me, imagining that his whole death was just some made up sob story in my terrible mind. Would I be here if he was alive? The answer is a simple no.

My migration to Seattle was part of an unplanned series of events that mystically brought me to a new purpose in life that I can’t quite define yet, but it wasn’t a mistake or unintentional. Is that what divine intervention is?

I have to remind myself that grief cannot last. Eventually, I will have to accept that I cannot bring him back; I cannot go back in time to him, and nothing I do or wish or say will change the circumstance. Death is permanent. What comes after?

Sometimes I wish I knew. I wish I could just be comforted in knowing that there is nothing to be sad for, that grieving was only my selfish emotion of wanting what I cannot have, missing what filled my life most then. But I do not know, and grief feels so much larger than my sorry self.

Do you think I could find him here?

Hiding in the mountain coves

like a plane wreck unmapped

like someone who doesn’t want

to be found?

I think I hear God

in the still waters

in the

skyscraper wind

that chases the birds from the ledge.

I think he knows I’m here.

I think he knows I hear him.

I think he doesn’t mind.

Can he hear me too?

Can he hear the boiling

behind  quivering eyes

where there is nothing

but him

and me?

I get lost in wondering

where you might be now.

Do I carry you with me

everywhere I go?

Are you living vicariously through me

even though

you are dead?

Or am I living through you,

your presence the wine

in which I dip my bread?