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I dance around it all day, longing to dive in, inexplicable why I cannot, like a lake I know not its depth or its temperature.
How fun it seems to run headlong, fling myself from the edge of the wooden dock and crash through its unsuspecting, placid surface.
It won’t mind, of course, it will give, open against the tender skin of my feet, say ahhh and swallow me whole.
I’ll be no worse for it, wet, chilled perhaps, my feet might touch a mucky bottom
Or not.
And, of course there will be my breath I’ll be forced to hold.
Still I will emerge, buoy up, bob across the water, cooled and exhilarated.
Surely I will be smiling. Like the nine-year-old I once was who never considered rocky bottoms. For whom there was never a lake too cold. Who had conjured, but never feared the unknown beasts of the unfathomable bottom.
But here, in the middle of my life, I have felt a lake too cold, heard tales of broken necks in ponds too shallow, have worried after the capacity of my lungs.
And with all that wisdom, I have lost the joy of abandon. Too much weight clings to my mind, pulling me under like the very anchor of an ocean-going freighter.
I have come to befriend fear and longing and ache and loss. They are dreary friends, they keep me tangled in all sorts of excuse.
And that nine-year-old girl, the bright-eyed blonde — all she really wants to do is to make up a story, to live in that story with her pencils and her crayons, for one rainy or sunny or blowsy afternoon, just for the fun of it, for the joy of pretending, not for the ego, not for the notice, just for the abandon. Again.
