It Is June

Lake water has its own blue. It’s own green blue with depth and secrets, a kind of stillness you rarely find in the water. It’s unmistakable silence and coolness. It can trick you into thinking I could stay down here forever, the glimmer on the surface– a world you’ve already forgotten.

We forget, and also we do not forget at all, where we come from. It fades into the periphery of a story you tell over dinner to someone you just met or a comment you make on a road trip when you swim in a lake in Nevada. How hot the air is in the summer, how cool the lake. I will grow old and my whole life will be stories, and I wonder then what you will say about me. What will be the epitaph attached to my name when you tell someone about me, over dinner when you just met.

For three nights in a row, I sleep fitful and dream of Havana. I wake sweat soak and woven into the bedsheets, tied around my thighs and wrists– little worried knots made by someone while they dream. I wake myself up yelling for you. I swim in the lake in the middle of the night to cool down. Sneak out the back door and walk down the dock barefoot, slide my body in the cold still water and never once think about what swims beneath me. Monsters in my head are scarier than the ones in the water.

There is an island on the lake and someone tells me one warm afternoon that in the middle of the wooded island is a field. That people used to gather there before the winters came and swallowed everything whole. I imagine winter to be like a desert, the way it seems still and frozen and empty. But is actually teeming with life, only no one stays long enough to learn it. But, this is not my point.

The point is, it’s June again and I was almost afraid to say it like I’d break the spell. June is an island. Something is coming but I do not know what it is. I can feel it though, sense its approach, wake up in the middle of the night screaming for someone who doesn’t even say my name anymore.

But, June is here, and I have said this before- there is nothing you can do in about June. You settle into it and let the rest of the world wait. Because there are no decisions made in June. June is a waiting space, everything else, a glimmer on the surface– a world you’ve already forgotten.

image: @jennyhouser