Untamed

Just as I was about to fall asleep the other night, I heard a faint knock on my bedroom door. “Come in,” I said.

Tish walked into my room and stopped at my bedside watery-eyed, apologetic. “What’s wrong, baby?”

“I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“Everything. But nothing. It’s not that anything’s wrong, really. It’s just—I’m all by myself in here. In my body. I’m just…lonely or something. I forget during the day, when I’m busy, but at night, in bed, I remember. I’m all alone in here. It’s scary.”

Tish climbed into my bed. We laid our heads on one pillow and looked directly into each other’s eyes. We were searching, trying to find ourselves in each other, trying to blur the lines between us. We’ve been trying to blur them since the doctor first put Tish into my arms and I said, “Hi, angel.” Since I first leaned over and tried to breathe her into my own lungs. Since I first put my mouth next to hers and tried to swallow her sweet warm breath and make it mine. Since my molars would ache when I played with her toes and I’d understand why some animals eat their young. Tish and I have been trying to collapse the gap her birth created between us since we turned from one body into two. But our separation keeps getting wider with each step, each word, each passing year. Slipping, slipping. Hold my hand, honey. Come in. I’m scared, Mommy.

I brushed a strand of her hair from her cheek and whispered, “I feel lonely in this skin, too. Remember when we were at the beach today, and we were watching that little girl wade into the waves and collect seawater in her little plastic buckets? Sometimes I feel like I’m one of those buckets of sea, next to other buckets of sea. Wishing we could pour into each other, mix together somehow, so we’re not so separate. But we always have these buckets between us.”

Tish has always understood metaphors best. (That thing you feel but can’t see, baby, is like that thing you can see.) She listened as I told her about the buckets, and her gold-brown canyon eyes widened. She whispered back, “Yeah. It’s like that.”

I told her that maybe when we were born, we were poured from our source into these tiny body buckets. When we die, we’ll be emptied back out and return to that big source and to each other. Maybe dying is just returning—back out from these tiny containers to where we belong. Maybe then all the achy separation we feel down here will disappear, because we’ll be mixed together again. No difference between you and me. No more buckets, no more skin—all sea.

“But for now,” I told her, “you are a bucket of sea. That’s why you feel so big and so small.”

She smiled. Fell asleep. I watched her for a bit and whispered a little prayer into her ear: You are not the bucket, you are the sea. Stay fluid, baby.