Rachel, I'm Swimming

From red to green, the street lights turn, first up ahead, then in succession, until the light changes here at Roosevelt Avenue and 65th Place. I am still walking. Water trickles along the curb; snow melt from here to Sandy Hook.

Then, besides this feeling of connectedness, others surface, too. Feelings of attachment and loss, childhood and memory, the way that innocence and imagination appear to go hand in hand...

When I was 12, my dog drowned in my pool. I found her there floating and I lifted her out of the water. Later, I'd walk into this pool in winter with metal plates in my hands, imagining myself to be Jacques Cousteau in the thick of an excavation at Grand-Congloué.

Naively though. Coincidentally. Then being an adult and finding old feelings still residing in old objects and being mournful for what it no longer is. The sadness and the comfort both encapsulated and lost, in an image.

Retreating into the amnion of youth.