Submerged

28 December 2011 03:54 PM Categories: The struggle

image by Toni Frissels, as provided by trialsanderrors http://www.flickr.com/photos/trialsanderrors/450974588/

The water surface is a thin film of molecules held together by tension, the molecules clinging to one another to maintain the edge, making the lake look like a smooth expanse of glass. It provides us with a parallel viewpoint, muted and beautiful, a reflection of what surrounds it. We look down. There’s my mane of hair and tired eyes and her glasses reflect the scene while the water shines it back at her, until it’s a clichéd series of images getting smaller and smaller, each reflection less real than the one before.

The bare branches of the trees behind the beach shake in the wind. Further along, outside of a small red house built too close to the edge (it always floods when the ice melts and the rains come), children play in the chill of a January inside my imagination, where the sky is neither here nor there and the sun hides behind a wispy cloud curtain and I know that in the night, the night things will happen. The lines will blur and the glass will shatter. I am looking forward to it.

Our reflection trembles. She glances at me, concerned, when a clawed hand reaches out from the water and yanks her glasses off her head, leaving four red streaks on her forehead. The children squeal and cry out and I'm not sure if it's little ones we hear or the keening cries of hawks circling the meadow beyond the trees. The sky and the sun remain silent, noncommittal, observers with no agenda. With glasses tightly clutched between claw and palm, the hand descends smoothly into the water, leaving behind a memoryless glass surface.

There are beasts in there, creatures with fangs and webbed feet, and sudden riptides that pull you away from the sand, out, out, out into the deep, where there is no bottom and you tread water and shout, feeling the small slimy things rub against you in the dark water, knowing you are alone in your predicament.

Remember the way the night blurs reality, the deep fall off the edge of the pier into muttering water, the endless drinks and cigarettes, until the lights go out and you sink. Until nothingness is as tangible as stone.

I can talk around things in metaphor. I make it neat and clean before muddying it again. After six days of family, the good, the bad, the in between, the first thing that came to mind when I sat down to write this afternoon was the deceptive image of the calm surface of a lake, unnaturally smooth, the air carrying a warning, and underneath this flat featureless surface (the one that reflects reality back to the viewer), life in all its darkness exists. Feelings surface and submerge, they hide at the edge of the drop off where the shallows fade away. The plants lining the rocky edge of the water are lush, green, and feathery, but most of what goes on beneath is not the kind of thing you want to see. Or not the kind of thing I chose to reveal. To make real. So there it lies, hidden.

Even I’m not sure what this metaphor means. The preternatural calm, the hidden world, the moments when the surface breaks … well, parts of it are obvious, but the question remains: what do I do with it?

Write about it. Dive deep into it. Accept it. Understand it. I can’t drain the lake. What lurks under the surface scares me, but it is also part of me, and I want it to come to light, to play in clear waters, to exist within me freely.

Write about it. Hang about on the surface in a fishing boat, netting the webbed beasts one by one, pulling the slimy things by the bucketful from the water, letting them dry slowly on the beach, burying them in a deep pit in the sand so they can rot undisturbed.

Write about it. Keep on writing. Sit on the beach and stare at the surface. Bring a friend. Bring two friends. Bring my sense of humor. We'll hold hands and wade along the shoreline, interlocked, and each day get closer to the creatures, holding out offerings of food, until the creatures swim up to me and we gingerly make our peace.

Or perhaps a variation on all of it, picking and choosing according to what is necessary at the moment of comprehension, of recognition.