Eighteen and sunstruck and sweating, my body was a wave that crashed and crashed. On the way to the picnic, I peeled a secret path away from the others to stand alone by the lake and consider my intentions to end it. Me, I meant. No waves licked the shore. I wore jeans with pockets but didn’t bother to search for stones: my will alone was strong enough. I was certain. I didn’t want to think any more. About the pain cresting through my gut, the dark spotted swarms of endometriosis, tissue gone bad, gone stubborn as fish refusing to give up the taste of the worm along with the hook. Of course I cried. Everything was messy. I hoped and didn’t hope someone would see me, save me from my self and the body in which I lived, which was also the self. Unfortunately. It wasn’t a lake, to be honest, more like a pond, and one so shallow I could almost see the sun in its center reaching gold down to the muck-clogged bottom. Ridiculous, I told my self, and my self couldn’t do anything but agree. I wiped my eyes and nose with the back of my shirt and rejoined the group, who in their kind politeness pretended I had never left. We ate charred hot dogs and drank warm Diet Cokes, ashed our menthols into empty cans. I wasn’t happy or relieved but I felt better, golder. I had made a decision and I had decided to walk away from it, too, and save something a little like my life.

 

Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her fourth poetry collection, God Elegy, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review: Literary Voices of the Queer South.