We skirt the edge of the pond and the air is sweet. Everything is shining, in my memory, in the way that a New England summer is warm and humid, and the water is so blue, and the trees are phosphorescent green clouds, and the earth is brightly red, and everything is altogether humming with the anticipation of us going swimming. The towels are draped heavy around our shoulders and we’re laughing as we walk, of course we are.
We’re almost to the other side of the pond and here the trees seem different; they fill the spaces in front of our eyes more. I pick my way through a tangle of branches and Joey follows. He points out a toad hopping across the trail, moist and beige amidst the moist beige leafcover, about as big as my first.
Around each bend in the path, we surprise another toad, all the same mottled brown but in different sizes, and they plop away with haste and maybe a little bit of orneriness, and we take turns saying “Look!” and pointing.
When we’ve taken a few toadless steps, a curious sensation seizes me, and it is suddenly clear that our gentle dirt path has actually cut incisively through a little wrinkle in time, and at close but irregular intervals time has faced us like flat doorways through which we have passed: how else could we have seen those toads, each of them not really a distinct organism but instead, actually, the same toad, first in its youth, then older and bigger, younger again, older still? When people speak about the space-time continuum with a lot of romance I usually laugh. And yet.
The sensation is over now, and by that I mean, it feels to me like we’re again moving through a more conventional field of time. But the magic lingers. Pieces of dust in the air are diamonds to me.
Joey is laughing about something else, whatever we were talking about before, and I squeeze his hand. I am overwhelmed by tenderness for him. When we clamber across a rocky outcropping to lay down our towels and strip off our clothes, I feel us turning the future into the past, vibrant young machines, soft animals, wading through the universe. We paddle out. The pondfloor here is pillowy and slick with thick, cloudy mud, the same gunk we had tried to escape on the other side of the pond.
We talk in silly, drawling voices. “I’m mudweird,” he says. “I’m Queen of the Mud,” I say, “I’m a mudwoman.”
He seizes me by the shoulders and shoves, sending me squelching shin-deep with plumes of gas curling up and breaking on the surface. I scream in surprise, in delighted fear.
When Sol died, and Joey was so sad, I would lie in bed with him and look up at his face and feel my heart breaking wide open while my hair got wet with his crying. Sometimes when I’m driving thoughtlessly to the grocery store, I find myself softly bending time in two. I dream of reaching into the past, my hands full of a more perfect love for him. Of course I loved him then. But I love him so much more now, more and more every day. I imagine being this bigger-hearted person and speaking to him in a gentle voice and asking sweet questions and telling him I knew how much it hurt, instead of just rubbing his back in aching silence.
I work in the present for a future I will never see. I start books that will be finished by someone else, every little action a coin deposited by me and withdrawn by some other girl with me inside her. The arc of the moral universe is a straight line from my vantage point, and it bends so shallow I can’t even see it on the horizon. I read once that it will take two hundred more years for women in this country to earn as much as men do. How long will it take for the police stop shooting Black people in the street? Once Isabelle called me from her mom’s house in New Orleans. She told me about the plantation they had visited, lined with proud oak trees that met in a canopy over the drive. I dangled my feet off the bed, listening. Can you imagine? she asked. Putting in so much labor for an idea that you would never see come to fruition? Those trees were planted a hundred and fifty years ago at least. He died way before they got tall.
I wonder now about the people who really planted the trees, enslaved people; I wonder about the landscape architect who designed the grounds. I wonder about the Black neighborhoods that were razed to build Central Park, about the teenagers lolling on the grass there smoking cigarettes in the summer. About the women marching and holding hands while they sing the same old songs.
There was always that one kid who would ask the class if they knew that actually, there is less violence in the world than at any point in human history and more wealth, that life is better for more people than it ever has been. Okay, I think, okay. That’s a good way to feel comfortable about linear progress. It’s a good way to feel comfortable about a lot of things, and I’m not sure it matters so much to the moms who keep their kids indoors to protect them from gang violence, only to find out years later their walls are painted with lead paint and they’ve poisoned their own children. We all want to measure, of course, whether the world is becoming better. Or if it’s becoming worse. I’m not sure how well we measure. I’m not sure how well we are served by the measuring. Sometimes, I watch the news hour from the couch with a glass of wine, partitioning the world into six-minute feature stories, and am overtaken suddenly and powerfully by the thought that none of the people in suits and blouses analyzing current events actually know how it all works. How can they?
I see my life spooling out in front of me and trust, as much as I can, that Joey and I will grow old together. I feel a sweetness for the intimacy we will have someday after the decades, looking back to now with fondness for the early past, I see the ways that we will misunderstand each other, I see him so clearly through the doorway as he bobs our infant daughter on his hip and murmurs warm little nothings. I feel the wrenching loneliness of being without him, ever. And yet a not-so-small part of me hopes that someday, at the end of the world we make, it will be him who goes first, in part because I can’t imagine him without me, and in part because I can’t imagine anyone else in the world caring for him in his death. I can’t bear the thought of missing any part of his life. Who else would be the keeper of his memory at the moment it becomes memory, who else would shepherd him from this life to the next life?
I can’t help but wonder that about the big world, too. Wouldn’t I do a good job in the apocalypse? Wouldn’t I have the appropriate reverence in the face of the end of the world? I have thought this for so long, secretly, of course. And this year, in the midst of so much altering for so many people, I am tasting the humility of how it might actually feel. The world is always ending, I suppose. The things we are familiar with are always slipping away. Now I think of the futures still lying before me that a past version of myself imagined, and I wonder how to find myself in all of this.
There must be a clock inside me, leaping forward and back. Sometimes the ticking futures and pasts are delightful. Sometimes they are grotesque. Does love warp on the face of a clock? I don’t think it does.
If we perch lightly, willing ourselves to float, we don’t sink down into the muddy pondfloor. A black-and-white blur of a dog bursts out of the tree cover, bounding towards the water’s edge. Voices clatter through the woods after her. She leaps into the pond just as the people emerge, blinking, into the sun. They wave at us and we wave back. I imagine I can still hear the toads disturbing the bracken leaves.
