Drowning

My mother abandoned me at the sound of my first cry. When asked, she described me as colicky and inconsolable. She would pass by my crib yelling at me to hush. I asked my grandmother about this recently over dinner. She reached across the table and grabbed my hand and softly said that I was a vivacious little girl. Her eyes glimmered as she described how independent I always was. After saying the word independent, she corrected herself and added, “fearless.” She reminded me that after the exhaustion set-in, I always returned to the comfort of her arms or nestled comfortably in her husbands lap for a nap. She described me like a kitten climbing up the curtains to the point of collapse. Then like my cross-eyed beauty, I would settle close to her nearly purring with content.

She loves to tell the tale of me climbing up the highest structure at the children’s playground and sitting there while she pleaded for me to come down. She’d even plod my older brother to climb up to get me but he was too scared. Eventually a stranger would have to get me. And after touching the ground I would rush to my grandmother and hold her tight. I loved her smell of ivory soap and schmaltz. And she would hold me so tight and quietly plead with me to never leave her like that again. She always reminded me I was loved.

Now as an adult, I no longer climb walls. Rather I have built them up like some impenetrable fortress, complete with a moat. Like a bad Disney tale, I am the king with a moat around my kingdom and I can’t swim. And worse, is I have only grown more afraid of the water as I got older. I wonder what happened to the fearless girl unafraid of climbing the highest peak. The little explorer who would stay out past sunset just to catch air one more time on her skateboard. I suppose too many times I ventured out into the cold dark water never to find the shore. Or perhaps the times I had looked for a hand to reach out to me, it never showed.

I found myself drowning today in a sea of bad memories and moments in time that I realized I don’t ever want to relive. And as I cried on the phone from the bathroom in the diner, the voice on the other end gently advised me that it is the walls that needed to go, but the moat could continue to stay.