Yesterday, at the exact same time I was swimming in the exact same lake, 20 miles away, a 14 year old boy who was swimming where I used to swim when I was 14 drowned. He and a friend got caught in a current and pulled out into the lake. The friend was rescued, but the other went under and wasn’t found until many hours later.
It’s had an effect on me, all day. Made me feel fragile, both in an emotional sense out of empathy for his mother and family, and in a mortal sense. I wonder how he ended up over his head, being pulled. When we go swimming, we aren’t out over our heads. Though he was with a friend. And it was a beautiful evening. They might have played themselves out that far with a false sense of camaraderie security.
Thus rendered fragile, on my evening ride to clear my head, all my cringeiest moments in life came rolling in to haunt me. Regrets. Fond memories of places that are impossible to return to. People who have wronged me. People who have wronged others. Great and close friends that have drifted into ghosts, decades ago.
My memory turned to all the characters that lived at the Section 8 housing, those 3 or 4 years I worked there. Looking back I can say that it was the best job I ever had, bar none. Mostly for all the colorful characters there. The Wizard guy who gave me the silver ring of friendship. The old lady relic from the 1970s who was a complete shut in, but kept a very clean and very yellow apartment. She would chain smoke in her bath robe and chat with you while you worked. I called her Mrs Havisham. Ed, who was an engineer, but also a paranoid schizophrenic obsessed with the subtleties of how his refrigerator door closed. The old yellow jaundiced guy who would chain smoke and watch episodes of Gunsmoke and share peanut brittle. The New York City retiree Italian dude who would sunbathe nude on his tiny porch and hit on anything with shaved legs. The gossipy lady with the gimp and the cane who had an apartment full of birds and bird shit, everywhere, even the goddamn freezer. Then of course, the creeps. The bad seeds. The domestic abusers. The junkies, and wannabe gangster lowlifes.
One guy in particular named Will I couldn’t stop thinking about. I half hated him, and half found him amusing. He was medicated for some mental illness or another, and never stopped talking in this whiny complaining tone- like a constant wall of talking, closed head injury style. He would only ever pause in this with sudden and random fits of rage and violence where he would abruptly turn angry and offended and scream in your face and try to push or throw stuff at you. If you brushed it off, he’d dial it back down without it getting TOO physical, but none of that was anything I was getting paid enough to deal with. I think it took at least a few months off of my life.
I think about them, and all these other people I used to know. And now they are out there, somewhere, in a fog of time distance and mystery. Life is like a horse shoe, someone said. I think about one of my earliest memories. I was old enough to get out of bed, and although I usually went to mom and dad’s bed when I woke in the middle of the night, one night I went into the living room just to try it and sat on the couch in the pre-dawn dark and looked at this painting they had on the wall. It was… I can’t even remember. Like a trail, through leaves, or a canopy of maple trees, or a creek- I really wish I could remember. Some nature scene, that mirrored some of the nature I had seen with my own eyes outside. The world was me, that replica of nature, nature itself, and two people- my parents.
One day it will again be me, a replica of nature- likely my own design, or painting- nature itself, and two people. If I’m lucky. And I wonder if it will will feel as peaceful then, as it did the first time.
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