Beautiful and Brave

In meditating on the lame man by the pool, I had the following encounter.

I am sitting on our dock at our lake cabin. I am eight. I wear my lime-green one-piece, the one I hate, with its babyish ruffle around the butt. I swing my legs above the water. It's early morning, and no one else is up yet. I look and look at the water, so perfectly still. The call of the loons quivers in the air. At the opposite shoreline, there is a perfect upside-down reflection of jack pines, scrub brush, sand.

I want to jump in and I'm afraid. Most of my fantasies involve being the first or the only one to do something, and being admired for it. Perhaps someone will get up when I'm already in the water, and say, What a brave, beautiful girl. I am also a weak swimmer; I flunked swim class at our town pool this year. There are fish in the lake. Sharp rocks. It will be cold. I look at the water.

I am a lonely child. My parents are worried about things that they don't talk about. My mother has been diagnosed with cancer, but no one talks about it with her. Nor is anyone is going to tell an 8-year-old that cancer means death, at least it did back then. My sister is 18 and pregnant, and we're not talking about that, either. I know because she's getting married, and they have said there will be a baby. Is she ashamed? Is she happy? She doesn't say, either.

I have become very good at being alone and imagining nice things. Just imagining. I probably would never have gone in if he hadn't sat beside me. He wears a t-shirt and cut-offs like everybody else. He shows up from time to time, so I'm not scared of him. Who could be, anyway? He is so friendly. "What are you doing out here", he asks.

Nobody else would ask this. What does it look like I'm doing? Sitting and dangling your feet in the water is hardly suspect. "Looking at the water", I say. He seems to see the real things under the surface, as I have begun to do. I wonder what he sees in me.

"Kind of early", he says. He frowns at the water. He isn't telling me not to be there, just pointing out a fact. I went out there alone because the rest of them would spoil it somehow. My mother would tell me to wait til it got warmer, my sister would get fed up with my fence-sitting, with no appreciation for the sad, terrifying beauty. She would jump in, probably, and goad me until I either jumped in or got mad and went away.

"Yeah it's early," I say. "So what?" I'm sorry I said that. I want him to like me. He doesn't seem to notice.
"Thinking about jumping in?"
"Uh-huh."
"Why don't you?"
I shrug and we both look at the water some more. It is so lovely. "Well why don't you," he asks again. "You put your suit on, in fact you do this every morning. I think you want to."

I say it's cold and there are fish and rocks... Everything sounds like a dumb excuse. My child self doesn't have words for this yet, but I am afraid I will be pulled into something I cannot control. "Do you want to jump in?" he asks gently. Words so close, they sound like my own.

And so I do. I jump in the water. It is cold, the slap of it like February. All my life, I've been told you're supposed to brace against the cold, not to be so exposed - you could die. But I don't die, I feel incredibly alive. And I do feel beautiful and brave. I look around for him to see it, but he has gone. He is always doing that.