By Lorraine Berry
How Do You Decide to Move On?
Behind me, I hear the thump of footfall at the edge of the woods. Careful not to frighten the creature, I turn.
The doe is alone. She is tall and lanky, like an adolescent girl who hasn’t yet figured out what those legs can do, how far they could take her, how fast they could get her out of here if she could only open that door in her mind that would allow her to leave.
If you shine too much light in a young doe’s eyes, she’ll freeze. Move the arc of the flashlight’s beam, and you can watch her in the shadows, flicking her ears as she listens to the signal that tells her it’s okay to run, that the safety of the woods is illusory and the way forward lies across a meadow drenched in the light of the moon.
I lie at the water’s edge in the penumbra of a ruined church. A crucifix—symbol of darkness and suffering—casts its shadow over the churchyard.
Sounds buoy me: I float on their jumbled waves until I begin to step into them, feel them flow around me. Underneath it all, cradling me as I drift, the crickets chirping. They sing alone, now that the cicadas have buried themselves back under the earth. I listen. Far away, an airplane’s engines carry it toward other lands. I startle, only for a second, as I hear the low splash of something easing itself into the water. A muskrat perhaps, but it’s too dark to see.
I hear the loons under a bruised night sky. They call, and I think, for a moment, that they are calling to me. In order to join them, I would have to sacrifice my legs, grow scales and a tail, become a creature of the water. I have never wanted to be a mermaid.
I ran for years. When I was younger, I ran the trails after midnight, alone, and made a game of my fear by running from lamppost to lamppost, from puddle of light to puddle of light, heartbeat racing as I contemplated what might wait for me in the darkness. Later, I ran from city to city, state to state, trying to find someplace that felt like home.
I ran before I learned to stand still. Still as glass. Still enough to hear a heartbeat. I thought it was mine that I had finally learned to hear. But when I lay with him for the first time, felt his breast against mine, I heard synchronicity, the cosmos, in the rhythm of our beating hearts.
I am grateful for stillness. When I needed it, and not before, I received the gift of being able to be still. Still enough to hear the change in breaths that told me he was near the end of his journey. Long legs that could no longer carry him forward. I sat with him, then. Still as glass.
That was years ago, but the stillness remains. The body of water next to my body is now flat, untouched by any disturbance. The song of the crickets does not influence the waves.
The word cosmos comes to us from the Greek for orderliness and harmony. To understand its magnitude, listen to the one sound separating. The sound wave flows and ebbs as the stars come out, each one a reminder of the infinitude of time, the finitude of the body, the smallness that is us under a bowl-shaped sky.
Art Information
- “Hiding” © Andrew Pescod; Creative Commons license
- “Raquette Lake” © Van Zandbergen Photography; used by permission
Lorraine Berry is a contributing writer at Talking Writing.
“The snow had been falling while Hannah and I circled. Not a heavy snow, but those crystal flakes that, when the light hits, make you think you’re surrounded by fairy dust.” — Not Afraid of the Dark
