Release

I was suspended, momentarily, in an eddy.

Gentle fingers of some submerged vegetation tickled my ankles and tousled my hair, which was coaxed fully away from my face and into the water. A gelatinous finger ran across my back, but I didn't even shudder. I turned slowly, round and round, with time to consider the sky.

I was floating down the Murk, that brown heady effluent of the Broad River, drifting slowly through hick, shibbolethic America, its wooded banks alive with lurid eyes. Yeah, I had hated that Murk for a very long time; living within the reach of it's stagnancy, that awful smell, had ossified something about me, some aspect which I could no longer live with.

So, at the apotheosis of my crisis, I took to the railway bridge just west of my nasty little town, righted my collar, and hurled myself into it's winding bowels of aquatic snake and snapping turtle.

I suppose I hadn't contemplated the immediate moment after the fall. This was not the Bay Bridge, after all, and was nearer a thirty foot drop which I suppose is not generally fatal. However, neither did I quite appreciate the buoyancy of this old sack of spuds. I sprung back from the roiling umber depths to – I swear – spring a few inches from the surface. After collecting myself from the momentary physical shock, I found the river was ferrying me gently along its merry way.

My life had been a marathon run in quicksand. Always fighting, every single God damn thing – always a fight. I'm tired. I'm tired of working, I'm tired of earning and handing over the fruit of that labor. I'm tired of the eyes, and the crappy little comments. I'm tired of friends, tired of romance; entropy makes each a lost cause anyway don't you think? The energy you put in to lose only one step rather than two. Better save that energy. That's what I'd found too late.

That's what I realized when I started floating down this river, held lovingly aloft. I'd tried too hard. Give it up son, the river seemed to say, I've got you.

The sun, generous and discreet, hung low in its late summer role. Plenty of warmth yet, raking across my skin, but not obliterating my vision. So I took in the sky and its mercurial population of altocumulus. Or was that stratocumulus? Do you know? Eh, what does it matter. It is, was, will always be a beautiful thing at which to look up and marvel.

Birds twitted in a copse when the river briefly broke in two. Some dense body plopped with a delicate splosh into the water just beyond my vision. A sweet smiling turtle, perhaps. Or maybe an alligator. Shit.

Peace in our time.

A little sluicing accelerated me through a smooth bob and turned me out with a slight list. I was now traveling in the direction of my starboard, evoking the days of youth when my brother and I would visit the local water park. Speed was exhilarating, and how you earned chops with the other children. But I loved the meandering rides really; the ones which slowly turned you about, and gave you darkness, and removed sense of space and orientation. A kind of imposed meditation.

Why had I stopped visiting this park? Too old? What difference can that possibly make? Ingratitude. That's what now flooded my heart; a sense of my own ingratitude. Our parents, poor and working, had paid for us to go every summer. I couldn't recall ever thanking them; not really. What a shit.

Now is not the time for tears old boy. That comes later.

If those odd fish that fly up the penis live in these waters, I thought, that would make me cry. That would be the time for tears.

Gentle breeze, more birds. Little dimples in the water; concentric ripples, tenderly lapping my skin. Restoring forces brought me round again so that I traveled head first, cutting a delta into the Broad River. I closed my eyes and breathed deep.

The Buddhists believe that if the soul can for long enough, and sincerely enough, let go, the pains of the past, the wrongs of the past, can slowly undo – and your place on the Karmic wheel is reset, and may fortune reward you all your days.

That's what the Buddhists believe.

Ahhh, warm sun, teach me your ways.

It was here I got stuck in the eddy. For some reason, the river's current had altered and I was pulled aside, nearer to the verdant, mossy banks. But I didn't mind. My newfound – what am I saying newfound – this first found, this intervention of perspective, of letting go, of sailing with life's sweet breeze, had fully embraced me, and I in turn it.

The river, in not killing me, had given me life.

I daresay the dippiness -- the doped up, baptist style joy of it all – was giving me a foolish grin. Perhaps it was this very grin which made those boys upon the bank feel they had to start pelting me with clumps of mud and stone. Perhaps they thought I was a cadaver. For the first time, however, I was made to swim. And swim I did, away from those boys; but not without waving back and forgiving them. I may have even shouted 'I forgive you', before relapsing into my supine drift.

My mind, comfortably idling, now found itself circling Cathy. Yes, Cathy. And I wondered if she would see me now, and think differently of me.

I had changed, afterall. What had she called me? It doesn't matter. But I was no longer a Neanderthal, pent up with the rage of modernity and booze. I had relented, willingly, to the way of things. She would surely have to recognize this.

A waft of insects fizzed about me, and despite waving my hands desperately (and breathing some of the midges in), when I came out the other side, my epidermis was distempered; heaving with itchy little pimples. The heel of my shoe – yes I still wore my shoes -- was unsuited to the job of scratching my shin, so I flopped on my side and scratched feverishly with my right while my left pumped through the water as if it's life depended on it. Because in many ways, it did.

The water took me on, and gained what can only be described as a very unpleasant smell. It became thick around me, as though there had been an oil spill. I craned my neck, and could indeed see pylons extending skyward from the wood. Some spillage from a nuclear plant? Waste treatment facility?

I cursed that men could do this, could blaspheme in this way.

The growing odour, the burning skin, and my stomach which was increasingly... perturbed... were suggesting something to me. I searched myself; self-delusion would be welcome no longer.

The river had taught me that in all things; see the world. See it for what it is.

A fetch had kicked up, and the damp of my skin began to crawl. With recognition, as well as chill. Recognition that my jumping into these dank waters was a baptism. Seeing the world for what it was, seeing myself for what I was – a new man.

Then I saw Cathy, long and angular. I knew if she could, would, see me again, it'd be different. And so I knew what I had to do. I turned in the water like a log, and swam, leaving this river of metamorphosis behind me. I was no longer a caterpillar. The dumb grin returned, and I let it. Cathy here I come.

But something got my leg.

It was sharp, blinding, and I could utter only a guttural, knowing cry before I was pulled under into a crimson dark, and the pitch dark beneath that.