bear/bare

The waterfall pummeled down and over, eternal or as close to it as we get.

Today’s Change of Heart: a weird little piece of lyric flash first nonfiction published earlier this year in Thin Air Magazine (thanks, y’all!).

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bear/bare

“If you could imagine yourself an animal, what creature or beast would you be?”

Forest wanderer, at home in wild thickets. Fat, not thick: berry-gorged and running through the thick of it, down the thick of it, into the thick of it –

Good. Good for what? We walked up through the heat of it, the old new burn, another. It hadn’t been my plan. (A friend, once, of my constant leggings-and-tank-top style, style in quotation marks: you look like you could up and walk into the woods at any time.)

And so I did. My thick body able, if awkward, carefully crawling through the destruction-strewn rocks toward Punchbowl Falls, over algae-slicked river rocks, blind groping. How I gasped at first, when my thighs went into the water. When it rose to my chest. When I sunk down soul-first into it, the cold a breathless pressure, a relief.

We slip-slid onto an island in the punchbowl, perched on the massive downed Doug fir whose death made it a bridge. My skin burned out of the water, a rebound heat, internal – the life of me, zinging across my sternum. Electric. The waterfall pummeled down and over, eternal or as close to it as we get. I wanted closer, wanted more.

And so I dove in bodily, frog-kick, dog-paddle, all systems go toward the source at the center, the endless rushing, this churn that has run ceaseless behind my back every day I’ve been alive, and before. I paused and tread water, already panting only twenty feet out. I ducked my head under, pulled up wet and slicked back, seal. Then kept going, kept kicking, pushed toward the living colossus, pulsing water-flow lifesource, place I’d never been before I belonged.

I pressed and pressed until I could no longer, and as soon as I stopped she pushed me away, sent me back where I came from, expanding and exploding like the star-lit night sky fabric, all that ancient light dashing away and toward us at once. I floated on my back, let breath move my body, pulse me under the cirque of surviving trees. And then I walked up strong onto the stony solid, free, cotton shirt suctioned to this belly I once starved to shrink, to this core of me, this the place where I keep it, where I keep me, where I am.