The Lake

What is a fire? How does one start? It sure beats the fuck out’a me.

I know fire is in want of fuel to rip through; organic things become withered, unspent and bored to death. We rarely see a fire when it starts unless we've done it ourselves, and even then I'm not convinced we understand exactly how. But we know fire well when it's growing. Flitting embers, up and away. A terrible heat that licks the oils from your skin. The way smoke gets in your hair and in your clothes so you’ll smell it again and again until they’re washed.

They started it burning before we clocked out for the night. I offered Adam one of my folding chairs and he followed me in navy dusk toward the pit, distant chatter and a flickering glow as our north star through the trees. Around the fire the rest of us cracked jokes, told stories. But he just peered into the woods hearing none of it. I closed my eyes to find whatever he listened to instead. Was it a creak of the pines? Or tiny mountain chickadees fluttering between them? I strained and I strained, but all I could hear was sizzle-pops from the blaze. He wouldn't so much as look at me, and I was always watching him. Week by week, studying the funny little ways his lips curled when he spoke, or the stubble sprouting on his jaw in real time before my eyes. Now I watched firelight playing in his lashes while he searched the treeline.

In my best tattletale voice I said “Aniiita, Adam's introspecting again…”

He flashed me a smile and I hot-potato’d one back, my legs stiffening in their denim.

Anita snapped her fingers at him the way only a mother could and wagged a teasing pointer, “Adam, hey! Cut it out. We're team-building.”

He had a journal with him and he'd drawn a pretty little mountainscape on the deckle edge of its pages. The others asked him about it, what he'd been writing. He said something evasive and I was glad, I didn't care to hear him tell. I only wanted to rip the thing from his hands, dart deep beneath the needle canopy and be lost with it.

What was this feeling? I thought I'd known love. Must be something else. Not for the first time it occurred to me that I may be deranged. There are people we know to fear, who do unacceptable things out of senseless fascination with another. Whether or not it’s their fault, these people are talented at seeing love where it isn't. It wasn't my fault. Today, all these years later, I sustain that even if I was pathological I came by it honestly. I made nothing up, so it couldn't rightly be delusion could it?

We'd only met a month prior.

I suppose I could tell you now how hopelessly beguiled I was from the start. Except I wasn't really, when I think of it. If we're being perfectly honest I suspect I was nonplussed. Was he so plain? It's hard for me to imagine now, but his eyes were eyes, his skin only skin back then. If memories are like paintings then time has an oily way of smearing them, and being perfectly honest gets trickier as the years pass me by. He was beautiful, I'm sure. And every year I think he must have been more beautiful than the last, funnier, more... Well, I won't grope for those words yet anyway. I'll offer these instead:

Growing up I was told we're all special. Shame it isn't true. There are those endless combinations of traits that make each of us our own, certainly, but to be special is to be lovelier than the rest. I've convinced myself time and again that there isn't a single special thing about him, that he's just the same as any of us. I know that it's right, and all the same it holds no water. Something about him is impossibly special, to me and only me. My God, I’m never sure what.

No, it couldn't be love. Love is common. Was it lust? I spent every minute wanting him. Anywhere, right in the open in front of anyone. In the dirt there by the fire, or in the store, the shed, the barn, the woods, the showers, the lake. Almost every evening I’d bother myself senseless, endeavoring to exist only by the crackling nerves in this part of me he'd liked briefly once before. And when I was done I'd sleep with a light on, expecting he'd see it shining through the seam of a curtained window, and come to open my door without knocking late one night. He made me feel ill. Filthy. Mindless. A beast of the field licking incessantly away at a wound.

Yes, lust. But lust is the surface of it that glares in the light, obscuring the extent of a thing's depth. I wanted to know everything, to taste every last dreg of his inner life. Every word, every pang, every night's dream that ever fluttered through his mind. I'd been born to meet him. I wanted his things in my room, his clothes on my skin, his skin shed to dust in my sheets. I wanted to catch his eye by the light of that fire and share a look that never ended. Then maybe he'd see past the sheaths of me and know it all.

I can say truly, now, that I know what this feeling is. And I can say truly again that if I called it by name you might never forgive me.

It's a privilege not knowing. There's a treacherous thing hidden within every one of us. Utterly blameless, but not without harm. It’s a lake inside of you. And you won't know it's there until the day you see someone stood in its shallows. They're waiting for you, yes. But like a mirage they come to no good end. If you wade in after them, I'll wish you luck turning back.