grief card 4

--- art and prompt by Hannah Spector, What is Left Behind

Sometimes when I pray, the lake of my body ripples. Namazu, Ryugu no Tsukai, names of messengers from the deep. When I was born, God took from my side, without anesthetics, what became fish, slithering into the roar of his waterfall.

Once, on Nancy Lake, I discovered my love for lakes, went out on a kayak daily, sometimes twice a day. Its immense capacity for sky crushed me, the shattered golds of sunset, the unbreakable rain-pierced eye, this former glacier. And beneath it, revealed only in my shadow, close enough for stare and dive into its fathomless, terrified me. I was but a skim, the loon's lone wail hovering unrequited. 

A small scar on my abdomen marks the exit. I wear my body for the one who left, the lake in me in occasional tremolo.