Surfacing

SURFACING

by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back

(Content warnings: death, substance use/intoxication, gender dysphoria)

Memory swells sometimes with the smell of cedar swamp, of cow
manure and the mold in mobile homes. Secret places on dirt roads
where the girl with her dark hair bleached the color of corn tassels
brings you in the middle of the night. The way you fell, laughing, onto
the bare mattress, wearing her mother's ermine coat and nothing else.
Amphetamine wave like a thousand stars adhering to your skin. 

Time will pull your bones long. Tall like they said your grandmother
was. Pretty enough to get asked to the hay loft of
the barn with a 26 of whiskey, suicide door open on a blue square of night

and the field below crowded, boys with wiry muscles exposed, a sea of
bodies that ruptures and seethes where brawls break out. Knife flash; a
car on fire in the field past the hill, someone still inside when the flames
engulf it. The wave of heat that washes over you before you see the
blaze. 

Some days are easier than others, sun on your face as you walk through
mirrored corridors of impossible buildings. You can't go back to a place
that doesn't exist anymore. Buried rivers surging below Toronto
sidewalks, teeming with the ghosts of salmon coming home to spawn. 

At the gravel beach, ducks coast on the mill pond's surface. The old
man who parks his car there says nobody lives on the other side,
anymore. Those barns with the caved-in roofs all torn down, new
subdivisions being built for strangers to live in. 

You took a rowboat all the way across once, when you were a kid, the
water holding your face’s reflection. At the far shore, a calf’s skeleton
gleaming white through green film of algae in the shallow mud. The
Bermuda triangle, a social worker called this place once, after she
asked where you were from. Sixteen and lost in the city. Right before
the first time you ever watched a person disappear. 

Remember when December still got cold enough that we could skate
between the trees on the flooded river? Remember when they found
Jake's body, and we drank in the park until dawn? 

Remember running past broken glass, burnt down houses. Remember
putting on his clothes and flattening your breasts under your hands in
the mirror while he slept on the floor, the first light of dawn caught in
his eyelashes. Your heart sick with longing, like it's been ever since.  

Maybe nothing stays the same, or should. Maybe home is a thing that
we carry with us, if not one we return to. Maybe make do and mend
isn't just for broken kettles, and that's why you're crying on the phone at
2 am, because you can't watch another friend circle the drain before
getting sucked down. 

Because in your first dream of love, before your waking life ever knew
its warmth, you were slow-dancing on a trash heap in the landfill,
between that wound in the earth and the round yellow moon. You will
always need this, the way you need water: to believe that there is
always something that can be salvaged; that there is always some hope
for repair.