Lakeside Ruminations

She blinked and stopped for a moment, startled out of her pensiveness by a duck taking flight. Her downturned gaze followed the path her feet traced alongside the placid expanse of water to her left, but her right foot currently rested a hair’s length away from the jagged edge of concrete she walked on. She meandered absentmindedly away from the imminent danger as the wind gently ruffled her loose waves off of her neck. She brought her eyes upward, searching for – well, she didn’t quite know for what. Something to keep her grounded. Present.

Flitting her gaze across the walking paths, she took stock of her surroundings. The lake, obviously. Grass on the other side of the trail, yellow and faded from the deluge of water absorbed by its soil after the melt of the winter snows. A matronly woman clad in a burgundy coat, pushing a stroller with a baby fast asleep, a mop of dark curls falling into their eyes and tongue lolling out. Two men – brothers, she presumed, based on their reference to a collective ‘Mom’ – sped past her on racing bicycles. In her periphery, a golden dog sprinted to pursue a tennis ball flung by its owner, much to the dismay of the gaggle of toddlers and parents in the warpath. A jogger. Another man riding a recumbent bicycle, looking thoroughly at ease, and then another stroller. Right behind the stroller, though, something.

Someone.

Gold wire-rimmed glasses framing hazel eyes with sporadic flecks of honey in them. Soft curls the color of coffee fashioned asymmetrically, one side closely cropped and the other side left long, falling just above those eyes. Loose and faded jeans cuffed to highlight periwinkle Dr. Martens tightened with yellow laces. A T-shirt with cover art for the album Meat is Murder by The Smiths emblazoned across the chest, and an oversized denim jacket.

In her eyes, this woman had a quiet sense of intellect, soft-spoken, articulate, and particular in her manner of speech. Someone who frequented independent businesses and coffeeshops; the barista knew she ordered a cappuccino with light foam without fail with every visit. This woman has a nervous and intense energy, her particularity and eloquence the long-standing product of incessant and obsessive refinements of any thought that happened to grace her brain. Nothing spoken until she is satisfied her speech reflects precisely her meaning; no spaces left for ugly misunderstandings to squeeze their way into her words. The nervousness grounds her, but can’t quite quash that peculiar quality that grants her an air of levity; lovely, free-spirited and blissfully unfettered.

She shut her eyes for a moment, shaking her head softly. Her eyes opened; the woman had disappeared – maybe to the train station, the grocery store, or a movie. Maybe to her coffeeshop. Back to her own life.

Sighing, the girl rubbed her temples with her ring fingers, and continued walking.

Still in the midst of processing. That’s the stage she is at, for the moment. She still hadn’t quite figured out how to feel about it, as if that really mattered, would make a difference. For the most part, she could ignore it with relative ease and peace. Apparently, she’d been doing just that for all of the years before. But without fail, something like this would happen, occasionally; for a moment, her breath would catch, her eyes would soften. And then the realization would clobber her again, a cold and forceful reminder this needed to be analyzed, sorted, picked and torn apart. Ceaseless, cruel, and cyclical, the feeling infested her thoughts until she felt as though she had split at the seams and only then would blissful nothingness return.

It’s always easier to forget and ignore something if you don’t know that it’s there at all.

The wind had become stronger and more insistent now, lifting leaves into the air and tossing them about without care, many of them finding their way into the waves of the lake now licking the concrete path and the soles of her boots.

She had read once somewhere that denial is a powerful thing. She thought about that phrase for a long while after. Denial is a powerful thing. Is it still considered denial if it’s something that had never been known in the first place? Is there a difference between denial and self-oblivion? Maybe it wasn’t worth wondering; the outcome remained unaltered, a fixed constant, a fundamental truth.

She had finally reached the lake, and she sat down at the edge of the concrete, her feet hanging over the ledge, just brushing the iridescent surface as she looked down and saw her warped and distorted face peering back at her from below.

People always say pain is relative, but she never really thought that was true – a person’s capacity to cope with pain was unquestionably relative (the people who cried from papercuts certainly proved that), but pain itself always seemed objective to her. This capacity, it’s a learned thing – no one is innately born with an ability to hold the seams of their core and identity together when it feels like it is being torn apart from infinite and contradictory sources. Nothing in her life had ever forced her to develop this capacity, and she was grateful for that, but she couldn’t will away the desire to have something manifest and tangible that she could point at and clearly label as being at fault and responsible for her.

It’s always easier to look for a scapegoat outside of yourself.

She sat on the edge of the concrete, staring blankly at her distorted face as each wave altered her features and then tumbled against the rocks.

Hearing a voice, she was startled out of her stupor by someone asking her for directions. She struggled to speak; her tongue felt fuzzy and thick in her mouth, clumsy – probably not enough water. She unscrewed the cap of her water bottle and took a long sip, pointing them towards the nearest train station. She watched the couple hoist their two children onto their backs and start jogging in that direction, seemingly unperturbed by the brittle wind whipping at their exposed faces, the light drizzle just beginning to grace the lakeside visitors.

It would probably be easier to emulate that attitude. Don’t think so much. Have a singular focus and go towards it with drive and precision. Strive to create the appearance of normalcy so no one questions you or thinks much of you.

Then again, she thought, looking with a slight smile at her off-kilter and lopsided reflection, she couldn’t re-create that same sense of normalcy.

She questioned everything.