When Ducks Fly

I hadn’t actually internalized that ducks could fly until that one afternoon at the stone circle we called a pond. I remember it vividly: How they took off then, soaring above the buildings. How I turned to you and said that The Flying Ducks would make a good band name.

You shrugged. “Not really,” you said. “It’s a bit boring. Obvious, you know?”

I nodded. “Of course, yeah. I didn’t mean it, anyway.”

We always ended up at the pond those days, didn’t we? Going for walks, hand-in-hand, through the muddy fields, a loop that took us past the pool, the ward for schizophrenics, the ward for alcoholics, and then the pond, right in view of our ward: the all-purpose one.

Your hair was short and the lilac had mostly faded. You wore big combat boots while I had shoes I got for a few bucks at the thrift store just outside the grounds. They fell apart just a few weeks later, did you know that? The sole of the left one came off completely, lost somewhere on the walk between my parents’ place and the grocery store. I had already stepped in a puddle before I realized it and had to walk back on a damp and dirty sock.

The day I bought the shoes was the first day you saw my scars. We’d squeezed into the same dressing room — there were only two and one was occupied. I’d picked out a skirt to try on. It was white and tiered and delicate, not like anything I was wearing at the time. You had a couple of button-down shirts, a pair of pants that ended up being too small.

I stepped out of my shorts and just stood there for a moment. Dust danced in the light reflected from the mirror. I could see the backs of your calves, prickled with red. I don’t know if I wanted you to say something or ignore the scars entirely. Maybe I wanted a secret third thing.

You let your fingertips graze over them. “That’s not too bad,” you said. You pulled your hand away and your t-shirt over your head. I stepped into the skirt. It felt foreign, the light material brushing against my legs.

“I feel like a cloud,” I said.

You smiled. “You sure make a pretty cloud, then.”

There were a lot of things I didn’t understand at the time. I don’t know if you already knew that before the moment I told you. We were standing at the pond and I had just realized that ducks could fly. One of the older patients was there too, kind of off to the side.

Do you remember this at all? Do you remember me reaching for your hand, you shrugging it off? Do you remember me saying that sometimes I felt as if the whole world was a play and I was the only one who didn’t have a script?

You asked if that was why I was there. I had to think about that one. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe if I had the script I would have known what to do to not end up here.”

You tilted your head back. The last strands of lilac faded into the cloudless sky. I remember thinking that you must not believe me. I’d never told anyone about the script thing before. It didn’t sound that profound out loud.

Later, you asked me to tell you more. I obliged, regaling you with the various mundane hilarities of my life thus far. The crossed wires.

Like this one: Second grade, standing at the window with a classmate, pontificating about the rain. Wishing together that the rain would stop, it stopping. Feeling like we controlled the universe. Me telling a classmate, him saying we were lying, that only God controlled the universe. Me, in all my raised-atheist bewilderment, polling the rest of our classmates. Declaring loudly that they were wrong, that their god did not exist. Explaining about science. Sitting in time out.

Third grade. Not looking at the teacher as she talked to me; her tirade about horrible manners and lack of respect. Being always too loud or too quiet.

Nine years old, at sleep-away camp. Two girls saying they didn’t want me in their tent because I was ‘too much’. The boy who dared us to lower our towels after a shower, me the only one complying.

I laid it out for you, these and many more, until you sighed and told me to stop.

“Did I miss something again?” I asked, and you nodded. “I really didn’t need to hear your whole life story,” you said.

I bit my lip.

You thought I’d talked to much, but there is so much more that I left out.

The whole thing about the crying, for instance. How I’d insisted for most of my life that me crying didn’t mean that I was upset. That it was a stupid societal idea to equate tears with sadness and that maybe that just wasn’t how I worked, maybe I smiled when I was sad and cried when I was just fine. The unreadable expressions on the faces of everyone I told this.

The repeating of jokes and punchlines, hoping for the same effect every time, that burst of laughter, that feeling that I was good. Good enough. Like the ducks: After you smiled when I first confessed my lack of knowledge, I kept bringing it up.

“Hey, remember how I thought ducks couldn’t fly?” became a conversation starter, except that the conversation plummeted to the ground because you began refusing to engage with my constant rehashing.

One night, we confessed our mutual crushes. I don’t remember who came clean first. Rare, I know. I remember the pure panic in my veins at the uncertainty of it all. I didn’t know what would happen next, and then nothing happened at all.

I don’t know what I’d do if I saw you now. It might be better not to know. To simply have those shared moments, those walks that ended at the pond, sunsets and hay swirling. The phantom touch of your hand against mine as I rocked myself to sleep in the hospital bed.

To think of you whenever I see ducks take flight — my incessant need every time to turn to the person next to me and tell them that it took me twenty years to know that such a thing could happen.