WATER

I went for a walk by the lake because it was nice outside for once and I got attacked by a goose. Geese do not fuck around.

So I was walking around the permitter of the lake listening to some sad-ass music, because I was sad as fuck, and I turned around and the goose was standing there in the center of the path about ten feet behind me with his head cocked to the side. I stopped dead in my tracks and stared at the goose, and I don’t know why, but I just knew in my heart that shit was about to go down. It was all in the eyes of the goose. His eyes were saying, Oh really, bitch? You think this is you’re fucking lake, don’t you? You think you can just waltz up in this bitch and walk around my lake listening to Alanis Morisette’s second album feeling sorry for yourself while you think about how shitty your life is?

And I was looking at the goose, and my eyes were saying, Please, do not fucking do this to me. The sun hasn’t completely gone down yet. There are still people here. There’s at least two or three flocks of basic bitch Vanderbilt sluts sitting around this lake who would see this shit go down and they would all put this on their Snapchats. Please show mercy on me. I can not wind up on Youtube right now. I’m no stranger to making a complete fucking ass of myself, but please, my heart can’t take it right now. Not today.

Goose was looking at me like You think I give two shits about your fucking heart? I’m a goddamn goose. I’m a heartless fuck and I’m feeling primal. You and I are doing this and I’m not giving you a fucking head start. And I narrowed my eyes at the goose and with them I said Bring it, bitch.

I turned back around and started running, and did you know that geese can fly? And maybe it wasn’t a goose. Maybe it was some weird goose/Velociraptor hybrid shit that escaped from the Nashville Zoo earlier that day. Honestly, have no idea what the fuck this animal was, but it was coming for me hard.

So I was running, and the goose was flying a foot behind me, making this horrible fucking sound, violently flapping its wings and picking up speed, and I know that it had every intention of killing me. I turned around and tried to bat the goose away from me, and the goose was like Bitch please and kept on coming.

I ran past several small groups of people, yelling hysterically, trying to ditch this goose that was still on my fucking heels. There were also groups of people sitting on the other side of the lake, and I knew they could see this ridiculous longview shot of some willy-nilly hysterical queen running along the side of the lake who was eventually going to be murdered by this homicidal goose who’s obviously sick to death of the human race trying to invade on his turf, trying to feed him stale pieces of bread. It was like some fucking Looney Tunes shit.

I kept running, as usual, and by the grace of God, for whatever fucking reason, the goose decided to give up. He flew up into a tree and I ran about twenty feet away from him and stopped and turned around. He stared at me from the tree. Know your place, bitch, he said with his eyes. I didn’t say anything else with my eyes and accepted defeat. I turned around and kept walking, breathless and sweaty, turning around every few steps to make sure that the goose, or some other animal for that matter, some stray angry-ass pseudo intellectual hipster hippopotamus that’s on its period, or something, wasn’t coming for me from behind.

I continued to breathlessly power walk around the lake, and a few steps later I wound up at a clearing and suddenly the entire like was visible. I didn’t stop walking until I was at the foot of the stone barrier that surrounds the lake and I stepped up onto it — and I know that I’m stealing this metaphor from somewhere, but I stared at the lake and it’s stillness and its stillness broke my heart into a million little fucking pieces. I felt my face start to swell and I clutched my shirt at my chest in my fist and I stared to cry. The last time I cried was when Bowie died. I can’t remember that last time I cried before that.

My shoulders started to heave with my sobs and I put both my hands over my face and I stood there one step from the water and bawled my eyes out. My legs started to go weak and I blindly bent down and fell to my side and I almost fell into the lake. I steadied myself and sat there with my legs dangling over the side and I continued to stare out at the lake and I cried there quietly by myself. And in that moment I wondered if for whatever reason someone might have found me sitting there — someone who would have taken the time to tell me that things were going to be okay — but at the exact same time I realized that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be found.

There’s some weird janky dystopian universe out there somewhere where I’m happy and where I am no longer afraid to write. I suppose that universe could be mistaken for the past, because that’s still out there, too, happening over and over again, swimming in the pool of the mind’s eye of the universe along with everything else, all of the experiences and emotions that we’ve shared, never forgotten, but never to be relieved again in this lifetime.

And I feel like I knew so much more then. If I knew now what I knew then, then maybe I would still feel like I was writer. Maybe I would be able to finally give myself the permission to be myself. You have to be careful with your identity and your dignity, because they can slip through your fingers and sneak out the back door if you’re not paying enough attention to them. But if you’ve been bred to not love yourself, it can be kind of difficult to take care of the things that make you who you are. And if you’re not careful you’ll wind up as something that you’re not, and you’ll have to find yourself all over again after you’ve already found yourself.

I’m a published author two times over and I have no idea how I’m supposed to feel about it. It feels like the whole thing has somehow been reduced to a fight, a fight that I never invited into my life. It isn’t something I went looking for or something that I ever expected. I never thought I would have to fight this way after fighting so hard for so many other things in my life. This is not a game I ever wanted to play, and I’m front row fucking center. I’m the pitcher. The quarterback. And I’m the only person on my team. It’s just me. I guess it’s always been that way, but at least before all of this happened upon me, I got to pick and choose my own battles, and now I have no idea what I’m fighting for. And all I want to do is go home. And I already am home. I already clicked my heels. I already made three wishes. I’ve lost almost everything, which means that I have nothing left to lose. And I wish that I had something to lose. Anything. I wish I had one more wish.

The water eventually started to do its job. The stillness that broke my heart slowly started to put it back together again, in that moment, at least, and my thoughts began to settle. My heart started to relax as the water put out the fire in my nerves. I always forget that water does that for me. My Astrological chart is made up of nothing but Cancer and Scorpio. Water is pretty much all that I am.

I continued to sit there quietly, and to keep the melodramatic juices flowing, I listened to “That I Would be Good” by Alanis Morisette (you should listen to it too. Why not?). Just me, the water, 90s nostalgia and Alanis, and that was enough for me in that moment.

The song ended and I heard the piercing high-pitched squak of a gaggle of basic bitch Vandy sluts behind me. I’ve waited on enough of them in my life to know exactly how they sound when they’re together. They ended the moment.

The sun still hadn’t gone down yet and I was afraid that they’d see that I had been crying.They were approaching me quickly, walking down the side of the lake in my direction, and they were the last thing in the world I wanted to see.

And I shit you not, this shit really happened.

The goose showed up. He soared in out of nowhere and into their faces making that horrible fucking sound, and the girls fucking scattered into a frantic distorted mess of screams and waving arms and flips of hair — and they ran away from me. The goose landed on the path behind them and chased them, and they didn’t stop running until I couldn’t see them anymore — and I was laughing so hard I was afraid I’d piss myself.

The goose turned around and saw me sitting there and I stopped laughing immediately, suddenly horrified that our fight was going to have a sequel. We stared at each other, but for some reason I knew that he wasn’t going to attack me again. We were just two animals, both of us angry, both of us sick to death of the human fucking race, reaching an understanding.

Thanks, I said to him with my eyes.

You should probably just go home, he said back.

I looked away from the goose, took one last look at the water, and I stood up and hopped down off of the stone ledge that I’d been sitting on. I started walking in the opposite direction of the goose, and a few seconds later I heard him squak. I stopped walking and looked back at him over my shoulder.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, and I smiled at the goose. And then he told me to go home again, even though I wasn’t really sure what that meant.