Am/Be

M. Doebel

Sometimes I wonder what my hands would be like had I not grown up so close to water. The discrepancies between air and water temperature are shocking, what is 50 degrees terrestrially would threaten my skin with blooming ridges, trembling and trying to cave in, slip beneath each other in the water. 

Sometimes, I forget that some things have an eternity, envy and anger tugging at my arms as I stop feeling sorry for the currents that are hindered by a dam in the Rappahannock when I remember that the water will be back here in a thousand years after ghosting through a few tear ducts and over the skin of a rusting bridge. And this all makes my heart an anarchist, insisting in an infinite web of should-feels and nipping new identities in the bud just because I don’t have time for them to develop. It makes me feel a little better to believe in reincarnation for a moment and imagine my eventual body, maybe so lucky as to be as insignificant and pretty as a water-skater crushed beneath the bodies of lovers in a river bed, but then I remember that I wouldn’t remember the feeling of denim sliding off my legs or the need for brambles breaking in my confidence as a miserably self-aware winter ends. 

I’d like to know something so simple and secret as how differently the piles of rocks in the creek tumbled 500 years ago because I looked at them as December wriggled against the filmy balm of August and noticed that they were all in different stages of assimilation. They all adopt the stream eventually, taking on its little mistakes as tattoos in their slate, one slip in the landscape making something more permanent than the ravine could have imagined in its childhood. 

If we got there early enough in the morning, there was a ferry that would rescue me from the South and take our car across the state line to a different territory and I was always the only one who thought the autumn trees looked less dead on those new roads than they did on the ones we had to call our own. I imagined there was a bold yellow line striping the bottom of the river as we crossed over, marking black from white and I even searched for differences in plant species overwhelming each side, making up legends for the making of each one: the loose ropes constricting the trees in a drowsy, half-reverie were overlapping halos disguised cleverly and simply by nothing but a color. The gravel on the ground looked raw at the dock and the hot apple cider tasted like cotton after I scorched the ravaged pink on the inside of my mouth, already brinking on blood from a habit that had me tearing at all the loose skin with my teeth, trying to make the home of my words more smooth. (They needed all the help they could get.)

               It was all yelloworangered and

                         chipping paint and

                                     one incidence of the sky not affecting mood and

                          words I didn’t yet know but

               that were part of my own language, I didn’t know, in someplace foreign,

     so close. 

You can’t fall in love with too many things at once, or people will stop listening to you. I didn’t see the truth in notions such as those the first and last time my father took my sister and I fishing. The parts of my eyes that were always obscured by eyelids still burned quietly with the fiery fingertips of the temptress of sleep, dripping back beneath the skin beneath my eyes, making it sag downward in a paradoxical resistance. Gravel crunched beneath tire in the parking lot, the sound that had come to mean “this is a second home” and the “BAIT 10¢” sign hung from rigid chicken wire and the little structure where a man with an impressive white beard and a face softened by the intake of stories was colored less by white paint than it was by morning dew. The canoes all slumbered in a row, in a place that left them unaffected by the moon and made them warm with the sun. And my fault is in the pauses, and so it was that day, I would have perched on top of the furthermost boat and watched the rest of them disappear with the sweet scent of sunscreen and searching glances, if I could have. But my father’s hand balanced the pull of the river and the tug of my instincts and we rowed unsteadily around a bend and into a hollow in the heart of the forest, a peninsula of water where the gold light was best for spotting clouds of gnats and seeing our wake by way of rearranged soil taught to rise to the surface and love the water better. 

These little streams and stretching lakes and Mason-Dixon rivers did to me what they did to the rocks, my hands have subtle valleys where ripples ran up to nuzzle my palms over and over and over, I think the ravines in their infancy would have liked the idea of my identity being in water’s permanency.