The lake

It was a day of trying to reconcile irreconcilable things.

This morning I put my road bike in the back of my rental car and drove north. Through a flat country with fields and blue sky and distant spires.

North is where I've felt prohibited. Yelled at. Why are you here? Why did you come? North is where I ceased to be me because somehow I'd been distorted by someone else's nightmare. North is where they were, nestled in a life with the man I longed to be with. North is pain.

But North is also where I met two little boys and played with them on a playset next to a bright lake. That memory is good and true and I will not be kept away from it because of remembered prohibitions from another incarnation.

So I came North.

The lake is 3 miles in circumference. I jogged, lame as I am with this still-painful ankle. And it was beautiful and peaceful. And I thought, I know why you came here. I understand this small piece of you. 

Then I took out my bicycle and rode across farmer's fields into the labyrinthine streets of the brick suburb where people live crammed side-by-side and on top of one another. And I became lost and scolded by the natives and claustrophobic, and unable to find my way out, and glad when I did get out. And then I understood you a little better. I knew that you felt trapped, too. I knew you felt you couldn't get out.

Tonight I talked to Lee. She's been avoiding my phone calls, although I didn't know it. The part of my brain that reminds me about the awful things that have happened in our family has switched off - breaker triggered by the bright patterns of flickering pain.

But she didn't switch off.

Brave. So brave. She met with him (although he didn't tell me that they met). Two meetings in fifteen years by my count. This was awful for her.

"We can't tell anyone," she told him, echo of the plea he made when she was 8-years old. I'll never do it again. Please just don't tell anyone. "It would kill mom and dad. It would kill Jane. I can't have anyone else suffer. I know it isn't fair to him. He should be able to tell people, too. So Now I'm part of this secrecy again. It's separated me from Jane. I can't talk to her."

I'm a believer in truth. But this truth has buried me, too. And I'm more isolated from Corinne than I've ever been, and wonder if I can find a way to come across this chasm. If I could not know. Not feel this truth, would I? Yes. No. I want it to not have happened. I want it to be un-done. But that's different than ignorance.

"This isn't the whole picture," I told Lee, praying that my words are truth. "There is always darkness in a painting. But it isn't the whole picture. We are more than our pain. We are also love.  We are profound and beautiful love and hope and joy. There is brightness, too."