Monday, October 2, 2017

10-2

Sometimes I feel I am playing a game with myself.

Children look at flash cards. Children watch television and recite words and lean too close over their mothers to stare at pages and follow her slim finger on the lines.

I am playing a game, too, to learn. To learn who I am.

I knew once, but he made me forget. I have been fuzzy and hazy in my mind. I am coming back into focus, but I am not the same, I don't think. Similar, but changed. I have not yet discovered if I have been made softer or harsher by this experience. I do not know what is different, only that something is new.

She builds walls, my friend is explaining to another. I like the way she talks back and forth of personal things between us. She is explaining us to one another, building a connection so we don't have to, and it's strange and exciting to hear about myself (though I am not so certain I want to be known as the woman who builds walls). She's explaining my struggles. She's telling her friend how I let my walls fall for him, and got swept away in the flood. I feel bad for myself, hearing that. I feel sad for the guarded girl who let her walls drop and got burned.

But she is not me anymore.

I paddle through the water, going farther than I have before. Why not? Who is waiting for me? Who can stop me? My shoulder blades shake with the effort, but I want to be strong again. There are birds everywhere - gulls and ducks of a variety of colors, passing through as they move to warmer climes. An eerie heron and swans I avoid warily (but they avoid me too), and even a eagle that makes multiple failed attempts to snatch fish from the water and retreats to sulk in the branches of a pine.

I am a girl who wants to know the names of the ducks.

I make a note in my mind. This is who I am. I cross-check, reference. Not new. That is who I was.

I pull up the kayak in the still areas where weeds have retarded the flow of water and grown into their own swamp. Duckweed layered on top hosts fast-moving bugs, and feathers in a multitude of colors and sizes and shapes from the migrating birds have caught up in between the delicate round pieces. I pull them from the water and save them. I will use them for something, or they will dry up and float away. I scan through my head. Not new.

A part of me feels strangely observed in this ritual. Somewhere along the lines I started to weigh my actions against what he would think. I pull the feathers from the water because I want to, but I wonder what he would think of it. I can't keep track of what is mine, anymore. I have to rediscover.

There's no one here, there's no one watching me watch the reeling birds and stir the stagnant ecosystem with the edge of my nails, so I assume that must be who I am. I feel a little contrived. Am I trying too hard to be this girl?

I remember it does not matter. I examine my motives, and they're for me alone. I do not care if someone sees me, I do not care what he would think, or another. No one is here; I am doing this for me. I can be a stereotype so long as that's who I truly am.

Squinting at words on the page, learning them. I have to become reacquainted with myself, and apparently that means I must question everything.

I make choices and I feel brave, even when they are small, because they're mine again.

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