Lakeside, June 2022

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 The air smells of autumn olive, is thick and humid. When I walk outside, roll down the windows of the car, it is a solid thing. At the Lakeshore, biting black flies swarm when i move into the shade, my skin wet with sweat. 96 degrees, 60% humidity. Only a few gulls over the still water of the Lake. 

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When I first started coming back here, 8 years ago, it felt like around any corner a ghost of myself would emerge, still living her life here. Today I waded into the Lake up to my waist, knotted my dress around my hips, watched the horizon. Women with families--women with lithe bodies and bikinis and toddlers--waded into the water and faced the shore. It is reassuring that I am now invisible to the beautiful young people on the sand. I turned my face to the horizon, felt as if I was moving backwards, spinning out of this  version of my life, the current tugging gently at my knees. 

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I cannot write. My mind feels scoured of thoughts; I walk and walk and run and run and think and plan when I get home I'll write, this is a poem, this is something but somehow it scuttles away, feels like I'm pushing two magnets together the wrong way, that rounded force field of no. I garden, I run, I scroll endlessly through social media, I can even barely read. I finished writing my last book and something in me started to churn away, maybe it's like a caterpillar in a chrysalis: I feel like I've become goo.

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But standing in the Lake, cicadas at the edge of the surf, I remember how I would drive to the Lake because it was the only place I could stop my mind, when I was most depressed and manic. It was the only place that could fill me with something other than terror. Other middle aged women in sun hats pass me. We nod each other, small children run laughing into the waves.

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Maybe I fell in love with poetry because it offered a masterclass into the creation of a self; when I read other poets I am often filled with deep and abiding jealousy: they seem so certain of who they are, that voice on the page. I have always felt fragmented--I know what I'm supposed to be. Who. I know what costumes didn't fit (eventually, not right away, even when they immediately chafed). I feel uncomfortable in my body; it's too soft, unwieldly, humidity does a strange thing to the body and makes it swell in odd ways. It is rooted, I know, in deep fat phobia that I hate that I have. That any softness in the body, any acquiescence to hunger is indicative of a lack of control, that the only way to be is hungry and unsatisfied.

I know how to bullshit that I know what I'm talking about, that I'm comfortable in my skin. I know who I am at work, at choir, on stage. I think I'm tricking you into thinking I know what the fuck I'm doing. When those structures are removed, then what? Just this small woman in a sun hat, bike shorts beneath her dress, standing waist deep in Lake Michigan. Just don't let me look at myself in any mirrors, etc.

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The night I arrived, after dropping J at his father's house, black clouds over the Lake, lightning, big rollers all night. Today, 96 degrees. I walked four miles down the beach in the morning, four more miles in the afternoon, a mile down the small country road the Inn is on. In two weeks, I run a half marathon I feel sort of prepared for (prepared as in: I will likely finish and I will not die). I waded in the water up to my waist, i bought a giant straw hat, I sat in the sand for a long time, till sweat ran down my nose and my legs were mottled with flystings. Tomorrow, I drive back to Chicago and fly home, alone, but R. is waiting for me there, and D. and my boy will be home in 10 weeks.

When my bird was young, I would take him each summer to Mackinac Island, ride our bikes around the perimeter, sit and watch the sun sink into the Straits. I was so scared. So desperate to be a good mother, to create a life for us that was free.

16 years ago, I leapt into the abyss holding my baby. 8 years ago I blew up my life and moved us cross country. Both were the best things I had ever done and the most terrifying.

A friend recently posted something about knowing when to begin, when to nurture, and when to recognized when you've outgrown something and it's time to let go. He was far more eloquent, but it has stuck with me.

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The sun doesn't set until late in the evening, though later up North where we live now, right above the 45th parallel. The air has softened, i can hear frogs from the pond in front of the inn, the regular whirr of air conditioners, a distant train. That little wan ghost of me who lived here for so many years since I left--I think she's going, dissipating into the damp air, cottonwood fluff, firefly, dust mote. And this woman is hungry, has poured some cheap wine into a plastic cup, is watching for fireflies on the lawn. Is ready to leap, again.


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