I Love the River, but Sometimes I Wait for the Rain

The river catches me, cradling my limbs in the tension of the broken water attempting to rise.

It’s mid-afternoon in June, and heat has been building under my skin since I woke. Each cloudy step of the day sticky with the deceptive, humid promise of rain.

The chilled water is a momentary departure from that reality and feels like it’s just arrived from a snowy mountain top, yet to encounter any other bodies.

I am special, I think.  

Or, this is special, 

And I am the lucky witness of it. 

I make my way to the rocky edge and feel the soft wind pull at my electrified leg hairs, long and erect. They settle after a quick towel patdown and a few teasing rays of sunlight, as I stretch my body out on the thin cotton material.

My friends are on the opposing rock bank, preparing to depart for their second or third jumps. From the vantage point of my green flowered towel, they are headed towards an endless pit or a flat rock.

They will disappear forever or be compressed into nothing upon impact.

I distract myself with the clouds above, my gaze getting stuck on their rapid movement. My head flips back and forth to keep up, as if the clouds are trying to confuse me about their plans, and give me whiplash in the process.

They are unaware we mortals still don’t have superpowers, at least not of the stopping Mother Nature kind.

I close my eyes and hear my three friends’ muffled giggles, presumably having survived the bottomless pit jump and now talking in between gulps of air above water.

I slit my right eye open, squinting against the few remianing daggers of light, and see six feet slapping the water to stay afloat. I want to offer up a suggestion about floating, that I’m pretty sure the frantic kicking doesn’t help, but I let it go. 

Drops start falling from the sky sporadically, with momentary pauses, politely introducing their arrival.

Having taken the subtle cues, I hear my friends’ feet pushing away water in a return towards me.

We stay still and listen to the strange tune of the landing drops, hitting the river surface and pointy rocks and soft bodies, until we worry about our phones, barely protected by folded towel edges, and decide to climb back to the parking lot.

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We place our towels, fanny packs, loose t-shirts, and shorts into the back seat, and two of my friends follow behind. I take one last look down towards the river, pulling a wet strand of hair off my lip.

“Wait,” I whisper,

Then I turn back towards my friends and speak a little louder, “Let’s jump in once more.”

“What?” says the remaining friend, as she spits into the puddles at her feet, holding open the passenger door.

“Cmon! Let’s jump!!” I shout this time, and gesture with my hand at the now slimy dirt path to the girls inside. 

I turn and start walking, determined, back down the trail. My new black Chacos sink into the mud with each step, gripping extra hard with the fresh tread.

Behind me, I hear mud squishing and the audible release of air between feet lifts as they follow.

“Close your eyes!” I instruct, as if I am the guide on this unexpected mission to the rocky ledge.

Before I shut mine, I glance at my friend’s faces, obscured by the rain like a sketched silhouette slowly erased on paper, and see their expressions going still.

“Close your eyes and smell the flowers!” I say with certainty.

There are always flowers somewhere.

None of my friends laugh or waste energy responding. We breathe in the rainwater like there’s no possibility of choking, desperately gulping it down on our inhales.

Each drop moves me somewhere else, to something else: lilies, then milkweeds, then long blades of grass that suddenly feel euphoric.

Blades of grass I’ve never noticed before landing on my protruding tongue in little bursting drops like Pop Rocks. The candy that would electrify my middle school mouth with tingling flavored bursts.

We stick our tongues out further somehow, then push our hardened summer feet off the ledge in a series of staggered drops.

Four sketched outlines of girls, erasing themselves into the afternoon.

Eventually, we will land, but we won’t remember the landing. We won’t remember until next summer when we crack open the thin spring shell coating the river, uncovering the never-before-felt water.

I am special, we will all individually think.

This is special.

“Nettles” - Ethel Cain