Eclipsed

The return to the icy waters, to the infinite blue. This is how I’ll find out if I have a story to live by.

I can feel the dust sifting through my shoes as I pass through the lakeside parking lot. This time of year, only the dedicated few still make this pilgrimage to the lake. One vehicle catches my eye. A black van — reflectionless, light-absorbing. Something like a chalkboard. Definitely not locals. No matter, I’ll have the water mostly to myself.

Closer to the water, I can see that the leaves across the lake are burnt red along the treetops. Windborn waves are whispering and massaging the stones left on the shoreline. They have things to say to me as well, telling me to forget, to hand my memories over to the depths. Release those stories told by specialists with their sonograms and MRIs. Their dies injected to find my contrasts and contours. Their endoscopies with cocaine spreads, and the many pointed corticoid needles they are poised to pin into my dermis.

It’s time to set all that adrift. I’m not interested in their anesthesia. Let the pain at the upper coil of my spine twist and shift. What keeps me awake in the India ink nights is the numbness spiraling outward into my right arm, fingers, neck, face, lips, eye. A hemisphere eclipse.

I slide my backpack off my shoulder and swipe my invisible fingers over my transparent lips. Toss my towel on the gravel. I’m alone on the rocky beach. Wading in thigh-deep, I see why the other swimmers have abandoned this place. A few frosty nights and the waters have turned.

The wind whips out of my lungs when the lake pulls me under, and I thank the pain that caresses both sides of my face. Where the bones swim to the surface of my flesh, the cold stings in an equal opportunity embrace. I am whole. Full.

I know the risks of entering these depths alone. In another life, I used to search waters for the drowning — silent or splashing. The families barbecuing on the lawn up the hill, the woman reading her book in the sideways autumn light. I doubt they’d hear me slip beneath the surface. Or notice my shadow self drifting to merge with the sediment.

Solitary excursions like these are how some of us will leave this earth. The turquoise waters call me back every year, even when the other bathers have gone. I suppose you could say the plan is to live until I die.

But, once more, I float back up to breathe the firey air. Suspended between the mirrors of the lake and the sky, tails of clouds rippling along the surface. I am a swimming thing, slipping in a vast alone, brushing only against an occasional burnt orange leaf.

I emerge. The waters frosted by the first fall nights, have released me for one more revolution around the sun, around myself. My walking legs extend and my feet find shallows where the mud is warm on my toes. Who cares if I can’t feel all my digits? I am, after all, a freak of evolution returned to warm myself on the shore. My articulated appendages are miracles. Whether or not I can feel all of them.

Shivering under my blanket, I smell the oak wood fires and sausages and listen to lilting laughter of families spending the last warm days together.

I can feel the grime of those stories leaving me. Those bespectacled men with their many theories, myths about my body, insinuations about my state of mind. I wipe off the last muddy bits, thankful at least, that I didn’t see a psychotherapist. Who knows what fairy tales Freud left behind through the generations — for my kind. Or how I would find a way to scrub their muck from my psyche.

Warmed by the dying sun, dried by the rising wind, I pack up my bag. The fine hairs of my skin raise and drift, reminding me where I’ve come from. And I begin the hike back. Back to civilization, past the families picknicking the kids flying kites and tossing frisbees. Ready to trek through the parking lot and down the road. Ready for anything, even with my face partially eclipsed.

And that is when I see her. Or maybe she sees me. There, on that folding stool, she’s placed beside that ancient van painted matte black — from the looks of it by hand. Creeping, vining white paint rising up the sides, flowering and reaching into the rough darkness. “The White Daisy” painted in a cursive that looks foreign to me. The van’s owner, or inhabitant, pats a dog with one hand and pulls a cigarette from her mouth with the other.

“Free chakra reading for you. If you like.”

Her accent is unfamiliar, from the East, I think. East of here anyway. It’s hard to give her an age. Maybe the lines around her eyes are from decades of smoke and endless days chasing the sun. She’s older than her years, or before her time. And I realize that in the pause in my step, the slowing in my momentum as I size her up, there is a whisper a why not?

I’m not even feeling cynical when I slide up beside her and park my still chilled bones on a rock.

“So how does it work, your reading?” I ask her.

I know nothing of these things. And anyway, I’ve got the feeling that a chakra reading at the Black Daisy is a unique experience that no other points on my journey through time and space have prepared me for.

“Oh, it’s done. I could read you from the path down in the trees. The blue is good for you,” her eyes drift to the place the sky meets the lake.

Her voice is mud and rust and her laugh sounds like an iron gate opening to let the reddening leaves inside. And she spins me a story of throat-centered flowers opening, of voice and vibrations, of a quest — something I have to do. Something I have to sing into the place where the water meets the sky.

The words bounce about my mind. The amphibious and spongy places within me listening from their watery depths. The husk of my surface shifts, restless in the breeze like something dry and cynical wanting to take flight in an updraft. And why should I shed that? After all, it is my skepticism that has brought me this far through the specialists and their iterations on my journey.

But I keep listening as the sky loses its last turquoise rays and then bleeds into blackness. Because the stories we tell ourselves matter, maybe more than the simple science of things. And perhaps, as the first pinpricks appear in the void overhead, I am finally hearing a story to live by.

©Trisha Traughber 2019: Story and illustrations. All rights reserved.

Author’s note: this is a surreal and fictional retelling of things as I’ve known them. But I wrote it thinking of my experience. Here are a few of the stories doctors have told me before. (Some of these are paraphrased from memory, others translated)

Mono: “Are you sure you’re not just depressed?”

Malaria 1: “Maybe you’re just pregnant?”

Malaria Part 2: “I doubt you’re coming down with malaria again. Common things happen commonly.”

Visit to the Back Specialist: “I can’t see a reason for your symptoms on these MRI’s. But rest assured. There are people out there who can’t walk and we’ve never figured out why.”

As the Ear Nose and Throat Specialist Applies the ‘Drops’: “Now just tilt your head back, these drops I’m going to put in your nose come all the way from Canada! They’re delicious. A little like cocaine…”

It’s weird, but it’s not fiction.

If you’ve had a surreal medical experience: 1) I’m sorry, 2)You’re not alone.