The day my flimsy polyester boat capsized. I can remember that as the first time I said, “I can feel it.” What i meant was that I could feel it going under, and that I was going with it. No one understood my ramblings back then, we were all fifteen; it wasn’t just me.
The ocean was a field, the boat a cheap two-man tent. A vessel to behold, our protector, the four of us piled inside, shoes kicked off. we didn’t care that we were too big, and too old. It was you who shouted; “We’re capsizing!” and we all laughed, because we didn’t know, because rules like that didn’t matter to us, we who dreamt that the messy constellations were real and not just scribbled up there in black eyeliner pencil, the same one that was smudged beneath my eyes and on your upper lip. We were gentlemen and ladies; we were anything we wanted to be.
This was before the capsizing, of course. That happened to all of us in different ways, at different times. The boat was always mine, though. I did go down with it that summer, and I’m still there.
while discussing our collective memories of a beloved childhood, the boy who lived in my old house before I did tells me about a hot monsoon rain that brought down power lines and flooded the main road. he tells me that, overnight, the walled garden outside the house had filled with water, around knee deep, he says, and crystal clear. he describes the excitement only a child can feel when such a change occurs. swimming goggles on, he'd waded out into a new world, an underwater world that wasn't supposed to be there but was, with little green frogs flying like birds over elephant grass trees. the turtle swimming dinosaur-like among the grass and the roots of trees. a miniature prehistoric rainforest. I imagine this memory was particularly vivid and memorable to him because he had felt utterly transformed.
we remember moments, especially as children, when we change from human to creature. when imagination convinces us of fantasy and magic, and sunlight streaming through water, through trees, illuminating specs of sand, that's stardust. and a flooded garden is a gateway to a new and forbidden land.
I remember moments like this from my own childhood, carrying the faded and rotting rowing boat out from the lake one winter on the farm, upside down over our heads, through the glittering woods like some many-legged swamp creature. slipping along down the muddy path until we stood at the edge of the flooded field, soaked from the waist down and shivering. grinning at each other like we were explorers on an expedition and had finally made it to the new and undiscovered country. flasks of tea in chapped hands and silent, the way only a crisp winter morning can be, still water stretching out all around us. this was also another land, another planet. and we felt transformed, in the middle of a field on a little boat, our quick breaths coming out in clouds before us like dragons. we were floating in the sky.
there was a time we built a treehouse and walked in the fading light, single-filed, bare-footed and topless through the humid jungle, waving arms warding off bugs, sweating and muddy, slashing at vines and shrieking like wild animals, stamping our feet to scare away the snakes. in this instance we were transformed, we were monkeys and birds and elephants. but we were also, naturally, completely at home here.
I could recount a hundred moments like these, of transformation. the view from the top of the tallest tree, in the air mid jump into the lake, staring directly into the eyes of a stray cat and thinking 'I am you', sleeping outside amongst the wild things. as we grow into adults, these moments become fewer and fewer, perhaps because we have fewer opportunities for adventure. it is all we can do, we who still wish to transform, to not let these moments disappear completely. we can tell the secret to our younger sisters and later to our own children, so that they might become the birds and the dragons and the wild, wonderful creatures and enter fantastical worlds, which are just our own, except seen through the eyes of a child. I guess the question I am asking is, how can we keep the magic without entering neverland, how can we grow up and carry on transforming? most people will remember their childhoods with a kind of melancholic nostalgia that presents itself as a sharp pressure behind the ribs. but might we just keep our eyes open? if we can I don't know how.
there are a few rare people I've met in the years that I've stopped being a child, who have some kind of mysterious twinkling knowledge behind their eyes, only visible in the pause in conversation, in the gaps between words, and sometimes, when they turn their face up to the sun, the glint in their eye gives it away completely. I have thought that maybe these people still, somehow, know the secrets that I've tried to hard to cling onto but have inevitably, eventually forgotten. that maybe they'd found some way, some loophole that allows them access to those childish worlds, little golden keys hidden in the inside pockets of their coats or on chains around their necks. sometimes, when I look at these people, I can see them transform. they are dragons and wood sprites, they are the wild creatures and the boat in the sky. I will seek these people out in every life, as if I can absorb a slither of their wonder if I stay close enough, or stick around long enough to be let in on the secret that I've so despairingly forgotten.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, you said, “Well never mind,
we are ugly but we have the music.“
2087
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amandla
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