Water

I’ve never really liked water, Bobo. Never did very well swimming, never felt the need to spend a bunch of time in it. I grew up by it. Just on the edge. Right by the San Francisco bay. A vast body of water leading to the Pacific Ocean. Which then connects to the liquid which covers 70+% of our planet. That’s a large amount of danger. It’s a vast, unfathomable void under there. At least by my standards. Living near it was okay. Going in it made me anxious.

Now that you’re gone, I wonder. Did I always have a mistrust of water because I knew the life altering damage it would eventually cause me? I know that when I was somewhere in my youth, I fell out of a boat on a river and my sister had to fish me out. Had she not, I wouldn’t have made it. She was there when I needed her. I was not there for you when you needed me.

You, on the other hand, really enjoyed water. Our pool, ultimately, didn’t seem to always hold your interest. But when it did, you’d laugh and splash. At school they’d spray you with the hose and you’d dance and cackle. You loved it, buddy. And it was eventually our demise. I say “our” not flippantly, or including me with you in the end result lightly. But it’s true. A part of me died on June 30th, 2021. And I’m trying to figure out if it’s a part of me that will eventually just consume all of me. Some days it certainly feels that way. And some days I find myself searching for a way to continue to memorialize you and keep you alive for the world. I know that only a select few can do that… those who can remember and love you in that fashion. And if any of us give up, it could cause the rest of this house of cards to fall.

So I continue. I haven’t cleaned the pool since you passed. I’ve added some chlorine. One week to the day after you died, I fished a dead blue jay out of it. A first for us. In the six years we’ve lived in the house we’ve lost two rodents to the pool. Never a bird. Coincidence? I think not. I hesitate to even look in the pool’s direction for fear the details that I didn’t see that day will be shown. I have enough details burned in my brain at the point I arrived on the scene, too late as is obvious, that I don’t need any more.

There are so many levels to this loss, I don’t know that any piece is more awful then the next. But that day is on repeat in my head. That time that only you and I shared together. Not all of it was catastrophic. We wrestled two separate times. You love being tickled. The laughter I can still hear, Thank God. That belly laugh. Deep down in your lungs is where it came from. Only to be extinguished later that day by a standing 20,000 gallon reservoir of death and destruction.