Today, I Swam

Today, I Swam

I drifted through nature’s veins today. I floated along without a preoccupation in the world - it was as if all fear, or sorrow had washed away in her calming blood. The sirens constantly screaming in my head were silenced and for once, it was just quiet. I could hear my own heartbeat, something I hadn’t heard in quite some time.

There were three canoes on her arms; my father accompanied me in ours. We both just sat and stared at the strange birds soaring in the sky. They screeched their peculiar songs while they dove at the sea searching for the cause of ripples in her static demeanour. Directly under this waterline, I could watch her hair dance. There were many green strands in the river.; it almost took her shape. I plunged my paddle into her abyss and the seaweed separated as if it had accepted me.

We stopped for lunch. We drove our boats into a tiny island housing a charred pile of sticks and stones. As I exited the craft, I searched for a spot to sit on this place. That’s when I noticed the ground was flattened, as if it had been sat on by hundreds of others before me. I joined them in this transcendent moment where we all ate our lunches with our families - where everything was just right, if only for a moment.

We kept hitting rocks. At times, the water level was very low - so low in fact, that we could see her rocky bottom. Though the water was unobscured, and we could see perfectly what laid ahead, we still hit rocks. For a moment I had wondered why we kept smacking into them, and that’s when I realized, it was fun to collide with their solid exteriors. There was no other way of putting this. It was surely enjoyable to rock our proverbial boat. Without these brief moments of uncertainty, the boat ride would have been mundane.