indiana

Regressing to my worst teenage impulses, I spit teenage venom at my mother and drove to the creek. I walked with a barncat a while, felt the midsummer nightsun on black-eyed Susan and prairie fleabane and wild bergamot, and when I came to the creek I waded up to my waist like a child. I moved with the god-green water until i reached a limestone bank. I sat for a moment. A little boy wearing a bicycle helmet joined me for a moment. we both skipped stones in the deep pool together but did not exchange words. I hoped he didn’t think i was trying to prove anything. his stones skipped further than mine did anyway.

After a while the little boy left and I kept sitting. I heard a mourning dove and a tittering finch and more children somewhere out of view. My heart ached. I wanted clarity of mind and singularity of vision again. I wanted the internet to go away forever. I wanted a fairer and kinder childhood. I wanted to be young and lonely again instead of twenty six and lonely which is worse. I said Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner. I watched the minnows and the crawdads and the whirling foamy ripples. I painted my nails purple right there on the bank. The bottle was old and the formula was gummy.

I waded back and under the boughs of a buckeye tree my mother texted me and my serenity was gone. We haven’t made up yet. I am rabidly jealous of my friend who lives down the street from her mother who is her best friend. I asked my mother, do you want to go to the lake with me or not, because we clearly can’t stand each others company, and she said it would break her heart not to go. She texted me that the hospice says my grandmother is at the end of life and that it was good that i saw her today. I didn’t want to go. she doesn’t know who I am, not really, and she couldn’t open her eyes to look at me when i held her hand in mine. She used to beat my mother with a hairbrush and snarl until my grandfather lost his accent. She hated my mother most because they looked just alike.

Will I someday cradle my own mother’s downy head and ask her in a soft voice if she’s had dinner? Will age blur my mother’s edges too until she crosses from being more palatable to no longer being herself? I kept walking past the neighbors’ goats and the Christmas tree farm and the chemtrails and the crickets, the wrong direction from home. The sun set in earnest. I wanted to cry but I didn’t.