The happy idea: sit at the coffeeshop by the river with your friend.
Believe that you are discussing the mysteries and on your way to untangling them when your friend says, Look, is that a man?
And there he is: a man swimming down the French Broad River, sidestroke, breaststroke, round head gleaming.
We sip our iced matcha lattes and watch. I’ve gotten my friend into iced matcha lattes.
My friend asks: If everything is symbolic, what does this mean?
But my mind has gone blank. Lately there is almost too much love, everything suffused with it and open. When a dog barks my friend barks. Like, really barks to be the sound.
The swimmer approaches the bank. He nods to my friend the way that people do sometimes, sort of realizing they have seen him before.
How was your swim?
And the swimmer, now a land man, grasps a bicycle he’s leaned against a tree.
The thing about swimming is how it clarifies and also loosens one’s thoughts. Puts them right on the tongue. The man tells us how good the water felt, how he dodged E.Coli by plotting to swim after rains, and then he says (it’s all a rush from him) that in the night a giant oak he loved fell in his yard.
He felt the big treetop down in his yard. The worst thing had happened. That green on the ground. So he rode his bicycle to the river.
Now he had to decide what to do.
I felt my friend think: I am this man. I felt myself think: I am this man. I felt the dogs think: ?
Every person in my life is so goddamn bright right now like another main character in The Overstory fighting against the dread gathering and gathering itself for what feels like a new revolting crest.
Something akin is happening for my friend, too, though I would not speak for him, though I channel his voice here — some sense that any idea, any move in life that resounds after, has been the wrong one and also exactly right.
We will lose everything and each other. We have lost already! When I look at civil disobedience that reaches another shore and changes minds, I think about entering and then going for broke as the peace-loving “loser.”
Yesterday my son’s baseball team lost to Ghost Nation 15U from New Jersey.
A swimmer swam out into the light the light.
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