THIS IS US
Floating, Drifting, Swimming
An old story about addiction, recovery, and an old friend
“He always listened to you,” your mother says to me and I don’t have the heart to tell her that wasn’t so. She doesn’t know about the time we were 25 and you jumped off the moving train and I picked gravel out of your back for hours or the time we were 30 and you got caught in the rip current and I knelt praying by the sputtering campfire as you disappeared into the waves.
So I pack a sandwich and a change of clothes and drive across two states and through three thunderstorms to your grandmother’s house where she is standing in the dust of the driveway motioning me to the backyard.
You are floating on a log raft down in the pond. I’ve seen that raft before one winter when I found you here — was it 2007? 2008? The raft was against the shed wall and you were crouched under it crying, cobwebs in your hair, crushed cans by your bare feet, a daddy longlegs on your thigh. That’s when you told me your brother made it, felled the trees and lashed the logs together, Boy Scout knots, two summers before he died.
Now you are lying face down on it with your forehead nearly touching the water as if you are seeing right through your own reflection, through the red water, through the roots and…
