Peeling memories

 

Skin peels like fish scales from my dry palms. Once water-soaked pruney, blistered and bloody they are disrobing their armor, pushing pink newness to the surface: a circus of circles where toughness once lay. 

Bits of torn skin catch on my clothing. 

There is the rub.

With time and without oars muscles once taut soften, recede, ebb. I am flooded with panic and want to re-seed my memory, want to hold onto to all the little motions and thoughts that have been left in the wake behind. I want to wrestle that feeling of Fuck Yeah back into my gut where it happily nested, made my heart chirp in appreciation and spring forward out of my (count the ribs) cage. 

The bird has fluttered and flown and I squint at the horizon searching for signs of feathers and sound.

My legs no longer wonder at the ground before them in weak anticipation of movement. It is I who am moving now, not the sole of the boat. There are no waves pushing plastic and vibrating through every fiber of my body, my soul. When I lie down there is no need to compensate to stay on the bunk. When I place a jar on the counter it stays exactly where I put it. 

This predictability makes me both relieved and unquestionably sad.

A few weeks ago I stood on a dock in Ketchikan in the middle of the night and I knew anything was possible. Not thought it. Knew it. As the days turn to weeks and now a month from leaving Victoria in a rush of horns and paddles, I am struggling not to grasp at memories and feelings of a three-week stretch of the unpredictable, of despair and magic. I find myself pulling at threads of images and trying to tuck them in around me like a Binkie. 

You know Binkie, that vomit-stained blanket you drooled on as a kid and wouldn’t leave home without. It was torn and faded and chewed. It smelled like pee and moldy broccoli with a hint of baby powder. It had seen you through the tough times of crawling and walking and sleeping on your very own for the first time in a dark room in a dark house with space space space all around. But with Binkie you knew all would be OK, that you were safe and courageous. So you held on and cried a lot (and died a little) when it was taken away. 

What now would remind you of your bravery?

My memories of adventures are like that: I don’t see the stains or smell the putridness as I wrap myself in the security of knowing I DID something. I survived. I can do anything. I want to hold on to all that made me come alive out there even if half the time I was out there I was distractedly thinking of back here. 

No matter, when I looked up from the spinning in my head I saw whales and porpoises and sunrises over glassy water. I saw mountains resting their heads on pillows of cloud. I saw double rainbows through whitecaps and stars through darkened shrouds. I felt salt and wind and somehow felt the sky, too. I heard the salmon jumping at sunset and humpbacks crashing ahead of us in the night. I was scared and electrified by joy. I was a spectrum of all I could be when I settled into the moment and enjoyed where I was.

The ocean was my blanket.

Now I see the sunflowers against a backdrop of pine and cedar. I hear the sparrows in the field and the chimes on my porch where I sit and type and breathe in evergreen. I feel the eternal wind that still blows around this earth, that took us from Port Townsend to Ketchikan and that I flew through home. 

As the muscles and memories from adventure fade, as the skin and images flake away, I remind myself that THIS is the adventure. Every minute of every day there is adventure if I can just stay present to it. Burn the Binkie! OK, maybe not burn but don’t be afraid to fold it neatly, place it on a shelf to occasionally pick up, shake out, breathe deeply into the weave but remind myself that I don’t necessarily need a trinket or image to remind me of who I am and what I can do. 

I am a composite of everything I have ever done and may not remember.

I wrap myself in the present moment, whale songs submerged (yet echoing) under the rustling of dry grass and fall asleep on solid shifting ground, safe and brave and sound.