In the Valley Between the Mountains and the Lake
Strange, how much more you notice when in that limbo between sleep and wakefulness. It’s much more than anywhere else. When awake, you are aware only of yourself, and the thoughts infused with emotion and energy knocking about in your head like maraca seeds are enough to keep your eyes turned inward, open. When asleep, either suspended in the darkness too terrifying (or wondrous?) to ever remember, or else a crash dummy batted around by fantastic and muscular hallucinations, your thoughts are entirely external.
Right now, eyes closed like an unfastened cargo hatch, limbs still but alert, I jump between the buzzing hum of in-here and the incessant white noise of out-there. The sails grumble and shift. The wood creaks uncomfortably, adjusts itself. The wind reaches out to caress the water, and the water turns over onto itself, embarrassed. The boat rocks.
As an infant, I could never sleep in a rocking cradle. It bewildered my poor parents for several nights; up crying, confused, afraid. It took several doctors and finally Grandmother looking at me in order to figure out that I was getting motion sickness, which she declared not as a funny surprise or even a diagnosis, but as a berating. I can picture the sharp-turned eyebrows and the quirked bottom lip and all. I can picture her face, the way she used to speak, the sound of her old voice: “well, that’s what you get for naming him after my father.” I can imagine the way Dad would smile, tiredly, nights worth of panic taking its toll on him, and turn to Mom and say: “Grandpa used to be so bad. Wouldn’t do anything on a boat but lean over the rail the whole time. It was hilarious.”
I do like remembering my old life, my parents and Grandmother, and the old street we used to live on, in the old town that still lies in the valley between the mountains and the lake. The early days, before anything ever went downhill. That’s how Grandmother used to put it, as though life were like riding a bicycle without training wheels, and you just had to learn how to move focus into your hands to stop yourself from crashing.
I was never good at that. As soon as I started going too fast downhill, it was like I became a part of the bike. A useless mechanism, all metal and rusted gears, no motion, no sound. Broken. Or else I was a wild animal, hanging on to the bars for dear life and hearing the vibrato of metal whirling against the ground and watching the cold grey plateau grow closer like I was running full speed at a cobblestone wall and loving every second of it.
But I would never make a sound. May the neighbor children scream and cry and panic all they like, I would have thought to myself, had I been so articulate then; I was refined. I was experienced. In control. Silent.
Until the first time I hit the pavement. Lifted my head up. Saw a crack in the stone and I wasn’t sure it had been there before.
I had mixed feelings about getting on a bicycle after that. On the one hand, I had just learned that smashing one’s head into a solid block of pavement is even less comfortable than it sounds, and quite jarring besides. But on the other hand, I felt something, looking at that crack in the road. It felt new. It felt good. Invincibility, domination, I was indestructible.
After the second operation and countless X-rays of the side of my head, however, I gradually came to the more logical conclusion that I was, in fact, ridiculously and profoundly fragile. That cracked pavement, once a symbol of my immunity, my strength, came to look far too much like the thin white scar on my forehead, that crossed over the slight crater in my temple before disappearing into where my hair eventually grew back. A permanent reminder of how doomed I could’ve been.
Unfortunately for me and my newfound existential crisis, Grandmother didn’t see it that way. It was good I’d taken those hits at such a young age, she said. I’ve handled the worst, let’s see what life can throw at me now. Whaddya say, buddy?
I said I’d never get on a bike again. She wouldn’t have that, so I gave in, because I knew that had I been stupid enough to pick a fight with her I would’ve just died sooner, anyway. Might as well go out with a bang. On an actual bike again, however, I suddenly had different, yet stunningly brilliant ideas, and even the part of me that was the most childish and terrified of Grandmother would have readily consented to leap like Superman off the wretched contraption the moment we were in motion. Sadly, jumping off a moving bike, as it turned out, had inherent complications. Eventually I learned to just stop pedaling and slow down and safely untangle myself from the bike, and eventually Grandmother learned that I was not going to cooperate with her teaching methods as long as brain damage was a part of the curriculum.
So I grew up with a minor dent in my head, the skull barely fractured at my temple, from where they had to heal and then re-break it in order to remove the damaged brain cells beneath. And I grew up without many friends, because after that I found I just couldn’t relate to the kids my age. I couldn’t understand their antics. I couldn’t connect with them. It wasn’t something they had removed from my brain; rather, it was something life had put inside it.
Unlike the other kids, I knew acutely that I was not invincible. I didn’t want to climb trees or sled down tall hills in winter, I didn’t want to taunt the neighbor’s pit bull, I didn’t want to swim in the cold, bottomless lake in autumn. Unlike the other kids, I had the image of that cracked pavement engraved into my mind, as though I had been that cold stone street. Unlike the other kids, I knew what it felt like to wake up in a strange white room with part of your head missing.
Ironically, brain surgery really only made me smarter. Or maybe just more creative. It was so quiet around me, just how I liked it, so I started thinking to pass the time; I explored concepts and ideas and things and the people I knew in my mind. I examined metaphors and tragic realism the way other kids examined bear tracks and summer flowers. I taught myself to use pens and pencils before they could spell their own names. Helmi. Emma. Nadi. Akira. I wrote their names in cursive on paper; big and unsteady though the letters were, it was something, and it was something more than they could do. They would watch me write, they would get bored, they would leave. A few would whisper that it was all I ever did. I didn’t mind. Let them whisper, I would’ve thought to myself, had I been so self-assured then. Let them sneer and mimic and laugh haughtily, if they should wish to. It wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway.
I didn’t need them. I had Me, Myself, and I, and we were alive, and together we wrote stories and crafted worlds in my head, and I admired them so much I could’ve hung them up on walls the way adults do, a display for myself, making myself a pocket-sized home. What would it matter if no one else was there to read them with me, look at them with me? I found that, after a time, I really didn’t want to share them anyway. Even with Grandmother, old and anxious and more desperate for company than ever. As much as I loved her, and wondered about her, what she was seemed so scared of nowadays, I couldn’t share that with her.
But I should have. I should have done something, shown someone, made extra copies of my stories and worlds and the pictures I painted in my head, and I should have hidden them somewhere secret, somewhere safe, because then, a little later, when I was a teenager, I came home one day to find my father crying in the living room and he informed me, a child, who looked like an adult, that the house inside my mind had burned down, and it had taken someone with it.
It had been nine in the morning. I was away at school. I couldn’t comprehend. I thought he had gone crazy. But true to his word, Grandmother was gone.
And then it was just me. No more worlds left. Nothing of my stories remained, when I finally tried to dig through the ashes my teenage years left behind, a decade later. With no Grandmother and my mother on the edge between staying and flying, as she had planned to for years, and my father in hibernation, a cursed creature who turned into a broken mess every night, something cracked again. This time deeper within me, where no surgical tools could have reached.
The scar I had feared, hated, for so long, I suddenly realized, was a part of me. As dear and as old as my eyes, my knees, my fingers. The pavement had become a memory, a legend, a myth, even lying still just outside the living room window. It was not I who broke his head against it; I was merely his descendent. I had learned from his mistakes. He had taught me. Grandmother, too, had taught me.
So what if I was not invincible? So what if I could be hurt, killed, by one wrong move? I had had enough of keeping everything to myself. If it wasn’t safe inside, I knew as well as anyone that it wasn’t any safer outside, but maybe I didn’t want to be safe anymore.
So I came back to my phase of adventuring late in life, but for what I had missed, I counted. I started climbing mountains, not trees, and when I reached a summit for the first time, Mount Akka, just beyond the primary school playground, I stood there and sang at the top of my lungs. I made my voice soar over the cliffs and snowbanks, glide through the trees, echo around the valley below. It was a new world, one I had never seen, one I could never, ever have imagined. I sang my name through the air, made it resonate, resonate. But I was respectful, as Grandmother had taught me to be; I would leave no mark of mine here but sound.
Then, after climbing all the mountains I could see, I started sailing. I borrowed boats without permission from the harbor in the early morning; not at evening, for that is when all teenagers go down to the lake and party, swim, laugh, look at or touch each other in that weird way they had started to, which looked so uncomfortable and invasive. Three, four, five in the morning, after they had left, I was down by the water. I thought nothing of the depths of the lake, the uncertainty that had haunted me before; I simply trusted that they were there, and had no more need to think.
I was exhilarated. I was out on the water, in a stolen boat, having woken up early and crept out the window and then hidden for half an hour for the last stragglers of my school-fellows to leave, and here I was, floating around in the night! What right had I to be here? What purpose? I knew not how to answer, and it made me laugh.
I hummed to myself as I let the gentle night breeze carry my boat out to the middle of the lake. It was early spring and the water was begrudgingly calm, but I took care not to drift too close to the mountains. The snow at their peaks, upon all of which I had stood a month ago, was glowing in the light of the moon. The stars glittered and shone brightly, comfortably, no longer hidden by the sun. They waved down at me and I imagined they were smiling, the way sirens and mermaids do as they sing and swim and splash each other, relaxing again in the wake of a passing ship, free to be bare and left alone once more. I waved back.
So in this way my childhood officially came to an end, and yet truly it began. I would spend the next years of my life wandering outdoors, hunting and climbing and swimming and nesting in the undergrowth of the great Northern forests. I was an adventurer, and my parents - now separated, and admittedly much happier - could hardly believe who their child had become. A quiet, shy, fluffy creature of the shadowy bush had revealed itself to be a lynx, strong and capable and solitary. I got lost in caves, I fell down cliffs, I saw more bears than I ever imagined could live so close together. I loved it all.
I wasn’t scared. I was going downhill all the way.
I like to think she would’ve been proud of me for what I’ve made of myself. Maybe even happy. It wasn’t like Grandmother to say what she was feeling, or to show it. It used to drive my parents mad, especially my mother, when my father had first introduced them and she was trying her best to make a good first impression and I’m so worried she doesn’t like me, does she like me, she could at least give me a hand here, she could at least smile. But she didn’t think like that. What Grandmother felt, she felt, and it was no one’s business but her own if she decided to show it.
Sometimes she did show it. She showed it after the first surgery I ever had, when I woke up and it was four in the morning and I knew my parents were asleep at home and I was dizzy and my head was so numb it was almost vibrating and I was so, so scared until I felt her take my hand and tell me to close my eyes again, that I would wake up again, it’s okay. She would pull me back if I started to drift away. And again, when she was lying in bed in her last year, and I’m sure she knew but didn’t say anything, and we were playing cards and the cat was lying there with us purring softly, and I looked up from my deck just in time to see her smiling, a wicked gleam in her eye right before she straightened up and dealt the combo that lost me the game and won her a pack of licorice. And again, a memory from my childhood that feels so vivid it doesn’t seem like it could be real; but in it, I’m still tiny, and she’s holding me on her lap, saying my name over and over again. As though I truly am the father she misses so terribly and almost never spoke of, a tear slides down her cheek and I watch it run, fall, come to rest at last in the fabric of her shirt.
In truth, for all the coldness in her eyes and the all-encompassing spirit of Yes, you can that drove us all insane, for all her blunt honesty and poor social skills, Grandmother was not a bottomless lake. She had a grounding to her, far beneath her surface as it was. She had an end. And, like the stones small children would skip at all times of year, even in the winter when the lake froze over, she did eventually reach it.
I don’t think she would have been sorry to hear that I now sail over her grave, and the sandy, soft spot next to it which will one day be mine. I imagine it’s nice and dark under there. Quiet. Nothing like the way the wind whistles against the sails. The way the planks of my boat creak contently, as they partner up for the night. The way the water dances, the movement of fish and wandering souls and wild mermaids below, as it carries me further out to sea.
- March 6th, 2019. Shortly before midnight.
Alright!! Welp, this is the first entry on this new writing blog thingy, which should technically have been posted like a week ago but apparently I don’t know the definition of the word “short”, and so here we are. Feels good to have finally done something, though. Further entries DEFINITELY won’t be as long as this, at least for the next month, because time and all that, but I’m hoping to post more than one a day in the following week, just to get myself caught up.
That’s about it from me. I’m going to bed now, goodnight ❤
