DFA Writes

Pond Number Six, Hopulikit, Georgia January 28, 2008

Pond Number Six, Hopulikit, Georgia

There was always something about walking with absolutely nothing between the cold ground and myself. It wasn’t but a quick walk from Jean and paw’s house to the pond- 5, 6, 7 steps. Daddy, Uncle Terry, and Uncle Kevin built the foundation for a deck the same year Paw built the house, but they never got around to finishing it. Paw just laid boards from the ground across to the foundation. When I was younger, I would sit and fish for hours. More recently, I would just lie across the ‘deck’ and let the sun pour over my bare feet and neck and warm my back through my shirt. I’d lay my head and look down into the water at my reflection- sometimes even deeper. It was hours of nothing but thought about my life, things that didn’t matter, questions I would never know the answers to. Sometimes I just reveled in the fact that it was so perfect.

Cohen died on a Monday in November of 2006. On the Sunday before we had taken a walk. It was chilly out and there was a light wind. He stayed a little in front of me. We kicked a pine cone to one another along the way. He showed me the tree he knocked down with a baseball bat. We talked about God and history teachers.

Throughout the wake and the funeral we all stayed at Jean and Paw’s house. I tried to take it all in. I remember walking outside and looking across the pond, but I could not grasp that perfect feeling. I brushed my bare feet across damp grass but all I felt was dry. I tried to breathe in the sunset reflecting across the water, but it was just a sunset like any other. I wondered what it was about death that could turn something so spiritual and beautiful into emptiness. I hated Cohen for that, for stealing my breath of God, of perfection.

I lost myself for a long time after Cohen. I lost myself in the way that a child loses his feet in cold pond water on a hot summer day. My mind traveled at a slow and uncomprehending speed. Days slept through me. I wanted to dig his grave and touch his face for one more inch of death against my skin. I wanted to pull his body out of his coffin to be sure it was a real, lifeless body.

I wondered what it must have been like to die. What he was thinking, if he was thinking. People said it must have been his time and I hated them for reasoning his death into a faith, because young people are not supposed to have a time and because we had plans for the weekend and people who make plans for the weekend do not die the Monday before.

I visited pond number six in Hopulikit, Georgia one sunny day sometime in 2007. It wasn’t my first visit since his death but it was a different visit. I walked over to the green- mildewed and water-washed boards and sat with my feet dipped, like I had done all the years of my childhood. I stuck my hand in the water and leaned my head over to watch the ripples vibrate from my fingertips. My attention slowly drew from the radiating water to the face that it reflected. I looked at myself for a long time. I could see fish darting behind my mouth, my eyes, my nose. I realized how alive I was at that moment. I realized how alive my submerged finger was, how alive the water was- brushing against it, how alive the fish were – swimming below me, how alive the trees were- planted behind me, and how alive Cohen was with his memory inside of me.

The lessons I was forced to learn after Cohen’s death are ones I would have rather gone without learning. I learned lessons on a frightening level. I have learned what it is to pick up the phone to call someone who will never answer. What it is to grieve. That people are not invincible. That Cohen was not invincible. But I also learned that if I place my mouth close to the water’s edge and blow, the water will always wrinkle, that the catfish will still swim far below near the pond’s floor, and that the wind will always catch my hair and spray it in tangles across my face.