life preservers.

I can't see faces anymore, just outlines of bodies swaying to the music. Still, I kick further because I'm not scared yet.

The water, any water is always more terrifying to me when I'm not submerged in it. It seems to me like a suggestion of a threat, an idea that gently points to danger, 'You can't control this." Yet, when I'm up to my neck, I almost always feel swaddled. Carried. Held onto. Isn't it funny that we call them bodies of water? I guess so much of their anatomy does personify human action, at least in my mind.

I kick further and further, waiting for someone to notice how brave I am, how far I've gone, what distance I've put between myself and the rocky cliffs of shore.

"You should be scared, " I think to them. "What if something happened to me now? Could you save me in time?"

Do we sometimes do things just to make people prove their love for us? Just so they try to keep us safe? Just to test and make sure.

There's a flat boulder perched on the shore. It's where we're allowed to congregate now that we're here for round two. Going to the Mansion is a privilege we've earned with our blistered feet and sore shoulders. Those trays get heavier all the time.

The boulder my friends rest upon is suspended several feet above the water at an angle no man could have willingly produced. Somehow precarious rings a little dull for the illustration. Still, here is where we make our descent on sunny afternoons into the relief of the lake's beckoning waves. It's the kind of jump that you have to steel yourself for mentally. The kind of jump for which you take deep breaths and count down, even as an adult-aged person.

The boulder itself is now shewn with beer cans, bottles, blankets, towels, discarded clothes, sun screen, and an inner tube. An ironic nod to water wings shaped like fishies. Or a non-ironic nod for those of us who are scared of the water. Despite the strong pull to be on an island surrounded on all sides by water and waves, a surprising amount of people here are actually afraid of the lake. And despite the swelling boat traffic and basic goal of getting drunk by most people who visit the island, very few people seem to drown here.

My friend Mary and I grabbed a bottle of wine one night and took off for the beach alone, a long walk from the trusty porch lamp that soaked the yard of our summer home when the dim moon couldn't shed enough light. It was a long walk made short by the wine we passed between us as we strode quick and sure in the dark. We reached and shore and stood silent like a prayer for a moment, taking in the dark expanse no one claimed but us. We floated and talked and marveled at how good the water felt on our limbs, how nice it felt to be so unselfconscious in the act of swimming. How lovely the lack of light. And then, thoroughly wrinkled, we wrapped our shivering bodies in towels and hitchhiked with some guys from the campsite going back to town, giggling in the back of a rusty pickup truck as we bounced our way back home.

It's nights like that which serve to snag like a splinter on my memory as I try to sand it down, simplify it as a time either bad or good. It catches just enough that neither quites fits- how could a place that produced such a perfect night be all bad?  Besides, it's a place I loved with reverence for a time. A home of sorts, if not forever. How could I ever simplify something so complex?

But Mary wasn't there that day for my test, and if she had, likely she would have been conducting it with me, along with the few other friends I've kept from my summers on the rock.

And then I remember the people I knew, their distance-muffled laughter and shouting above The Moon and Antarctica coming from portable speakers, blissfully unconcerned with the growing distance between my rhythmic movement and the boulder on which they stood. It was then that I realized the faces didn't matter so much as the human proximity. Aside from a few strong female bonds, roles could be filled by nearly anyone, so long as they were willing to read the lines with enough bravado. When I was gone, as I would be a few short weeks from that day, someone else would be fucking my boyfriend, coaxing drink orders out of windblown tourists, and drinking straight from the bottle on the boulder with my friends.

The realization made me feel so much smaller than treading water out in the middle of a constantly moving great lake ever did.

I'm a strong swimmer, so I never really had to test the allegiance of the people standing ashore to the drum of my pulse, a fact for which I'm sure, even in their ignorance, they're infinitely grateful.

As am I.

help i'm alive.

It's a work night.

I need to be dressed and combed and sitting up straight in my cubicle at eight tomorrow morning. It's not that far away, but right now it's never going to come. I change my clothes while I'm driving away from work. It's not coming, I just left. I'm shaking with anxiety. I'm riddled with energy. I'm doing this. I'm doing this. It's fine.

It's not tomorrow. It's tonight and now five us are are crammed into Katherine's little red car and we're racing east toward the state line. We'll scream with glee as we streak under the arch and keep catapulting forward, onward onward.

We're drinking sweet cheap wine out of water bottles like it's our life blood. There's an entire box, maybe more between us. We're on a mission.  Daring each other to be the one to take a breather. Passing the bottle as fast as we can. And we're screaming the words to the songs wailing out of the speakers as Jessica steers the careening vessel and plays DJ, our hair whipping unpredictably in the wind, aloof and free.

We're racing the clock faster faster, we're holding in our bladders and willing the gas gauge not to drop. We don't have a second to spare. We've got to hurry, the show will start without us there to cheer and dance and sing. The show must go on.

I'd been feeling so old lately, commuting and counting pennies and ironing my pants. My eyes feel older from staring at spreadsheets instead of horizon lines and rear view mirrors. I feel lodged into something immovable and unforgiving, not held or embraced, but rather, trapped. Embedded into a surface that makes me feel like a shard of who I want to be. Splintered off from the whole. I used to move so fast. Now I'm sleeping through my waking hours. But tonight I feel awake. Tonight I'm doing something irresponsible and I feel like myself again.

The purple rims of my heart shaped sunglasses keep staining the edges of everything I see, Framing the flat landscape into something pleasurable. It's been so long since I felt like I was in the right place at exactly the right time. And this right place is a speeding bullet, filled with the people who furnish the home I hold in my heart.

We're laughing so hard I wish I could remember the joke. We'll beat the sun to our point on the horizon.

I'll never feel hungry again so long as this feeling is filling me up. I'm holding it in my mouth, I'm biting down on its sustenance. I feel so full.

I spill red wine down my chin and we go into a laughing fit. I can hardly hear what they're saying, these people I love, but I can read their minds. I know what you mean. That look tells me everything I'll ever need to know. I remember the corners of my mouth, wine streaming down my chin on both sides and I swipe at my wet skin with the back of my hands. Stains on my face like Dracula, stains on my hands like a murderer. Tattoos from this night. I wish they'd never fade. Stay sticky forever.

We make it and we're running and stumbling and talking so loud down the street toward the show, the cement old and weathered, pocked with imperfections. We can't relate. It's a dance we're doing together, moving down the sidewalk, slick salty limbs. Sunglasses in the dark. We're fine. We're fine. We're going an infinite distance in every direction just because we can. No one understands us the way we understand each other.

 It's dark and cool and there are so many bodies. We lose each other, but not really.

More! More! More!

What time will we home tonight? Three? Four? It's never mattered. The instant I got into the car tonight I knew it didn't matter. I remind myself.

We're singing and dancing and slugging back bourbon. But none of this crowd could ever be so loud, so bright as our race against the sun to get there. Three hours of soaking in each other.

"We're so close, to something better left unknown."

Goddamn right. I swing myself around. Goddamn right...

I sit in my cube at 7:59. Bleary eyed. Sit up straight, Sara. My body feels like everything it's doing is on an echo. Twice, three times I feel myself sit down in my chair, each time the sensation fades a little more. I'm perfectly still. I will my hands to type in my passwords. I'm running on sensory memory.

In the dark, on our way back, we pulled over in the side of the highway. I'm retching. It's hot. It's cold. Erin flounces out of the car and suddenly she's running backwards to catch her balance, but she can't get behind her legs fast enough and she falls. Legs in the air. Without missing a beat, there are arms reaching out to her.  Always long enough.

A swell of laughter and then we're all packed in again, moving. Homeward. My head across a lap. We're somehow already there.