Fools wander among names and appearances.

–The Buddha

Water darkens the night-sky–an inky black mirror drowning even the moon.

“How long have they been gone?” I ask.

“Three hours.”

I gaze out at the infinite. Despite my many faults, I am a straightforward man, not one prone to exaggeration. I know two things:

1.     I cannot tell where the water ends and the sky begins.

2.     I am scared.

“They should’ve been back by now.”

Adam sighs.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know.”

Their backpacks lean against a mossy boulder a few feet away, staring at me.

“If their canoe tipped…”

“I know.”

“Night fishing.”

“Stupid.”

Behind us, near the dull red flames of a fading fire, someone is snoring.

“Should we wake him?” I ask.

“No. Not yet.”

Adam reaches into his coat pocket. A flashlight clicks on. Bands of light thick like rolled dough ooze into the night before evaporating into darkness.

“I can’t see a thing,” I say.

“But they’ll be able to see the light. Y’know, like a lighthouse.”

“Hopefully.”

“Here,” Adam says, pulling another flashlight from his pocket. “For the other side of the island. If they’re over there, they’ll see it.”

The cold metal flashlight adheres to my sweaty palms, forming an icy bond. Even though I had trekked to the other side of the island earlier in the day to forage for mushrooms and wildberries, I shudder. The island isn’t large– maybe a hundred yards across– but the thought of crossing it in the night is daunting.

I head over to my pack and fumble around in the top pouch until I find the bear spray. Feeling the bulky canister against my hip provides some semblance of reassurance as I set off down the path toward the pit toilet.

The all-consuming smell of lime and feces drags me

down

down

down

down

down

down

down

into

a

damp,

dark

hole

of

memory

I once forgot what things were and that they had names. It was only for a moment– an eternal, fleeting moment. And it wasn’t even a moment. A moment is a name for a thing. There were no names. No things.

How can I describe my brain injury to you? I can’t even describe it to myself. Brain damage is not like a broken leg or a perforated bowel, it is not your heart skipping a beat or even your lungs collapsing in the heat– it is as if the world itself is torn asunder, as if you could take the fabric of reality in your hands and cut it like twine held taut in the air leaving you alone and yet sliced into a thousand pieces (struggling in a stormy sea of memory, detangled from threefold-time, drowning in the depths of a dream).

It sounds scary.

Yeah.

I suppose it is.  

*

A globe of harsh yellow light illuminates the end of the trail. Between here and the far point of the island is an untrod mess of brambles, bushes, and rotting logs (what else?).

Even this far into the forest, out of earshot of the hissing and popping campfire, I hear him snoring. A part of me wants to go back and wake him. A part that is terrified of being alone. A magnet in my stomach yanking me backwards toward my sleeping friend.

I chastise myself.

No.

It’s a selfish impulse. The only reason I want to yank him into waking reality is that I’d rather be in his place–peacefully asleep, blissfully unaware.

I step into the night, gooseflesh rippling across my body in waves.

*

We do not ignore the use of meaning in dreaming. But it is good to recognize that there is also dreaming in meaning.

–Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

The big dream happened on a little night– one of no great importance.

In the beginning, there was the essence of femininity. I was a girl and had never been a man. There is no clear way to explain this– after all, girls and boys are things with names. 

I walked through childhood knowing the faces of my father and mother, feeling their warmth, loving their safety. My bedroom was filled with soft touches, bright colors, and a spinning carousel of friends with smiles on their faces. A big dog slept in my bed at night, keeping the monsters at bay. His name was George.

It all was so normal, so right.

As I grew older, the hourglass of time tipped over, spilling its sand in bulky chunks rather than grain by grain. I was living my life in confusion, puzzled, struggling to understand how the pieces fit together.

By the time I reached high school, in geometry class, abstract shapes were floating through the air. Numbers wandered up to me and explained themselves in illuminating monologues. When I watched TV, the characters talked directly to me and divulged secrets about myself that I had never known.

The clearer things became, the worse my report card. Eventually, my parents were called into the principal’s office.

“There has to be an explanation for why such a bright girl’s grades are slipping like this.”

“It must be drinking.”

“And drugs.”

“Anxiety?”

“Or a boy.”

In truth, it made no sense. The depth at which I was understanding things should have made life easier. People should’ve been bowing to my wisdom, following the trail of breadcrumbs I was sniffing and eating them out of my hands.

My parents, once my safe harbor, became spies and saboteurs. Their arguments made no sense; they tried to gaslight me into believing things that clearly weren’t true.  

One night, after a vicious fight with my parents, they called 9-1-1. An ambulance kidnapped me, strapped my writhing body to a stretcher, dragged me to the hospital, and threw me into an empty room by myself.

The twisting lines on the walls spelled out secrets too significant to let slip into obscurity, so I wrote them on my arms with blood. I did not want to forget. I couldn’t forget. Too much depended on it.

After some time, sleep took me out of sheer exhaustion.

I woke up in a cold sweat. Terror shook me like a building collapsing in on itself. The room was dark, too dark to make out where or even who I was, and for a moment, an eternal, fleeting moment, I didn’t know if I was a man or a girl.

Maybe I still don’t.

*

Night curdles nature into a rotten shadow of itself.

The forest, thick, too thick to move through in a straight line, compels you to zigzag, hop, skip, and dance your way along like a tortured circus animal while tangled thorns and thistles whip your sides bloody, and mushrooms, hiding in the underworld mere hours before, leer and jeer at you and balloon in rings and upside down on twisted, fallen trees, laughing… you can almost hear them laughing (the fairies of the forest, did you fall into one of their portals?) laughing at you while you cling to lamplight like a lifeline, an untethered rope in the middle of an infinite ocean, barred owls cackling like monkeys, hoots and hollers, cacophonies of crickets and cicadas– madness, my god, the madness of it all.

You stumble into a clearing and pause.

Through it all, you can still hear him snoring.

*

Let me take you down, ‘cause I’m going to

Strawberry Fields

Nothing is real

And nothing to get hung about

Strawberry Fields forever

Living is easy with eyes closed

Misunderstanding all you see

It’s getting hard to be someone, but it all works out

It doesn’t matter much to me.

–The Beatles, “Strawberry Fields Forever”

Faint visions of a child’s funeral.

Rain befitting the occasion.

I’m jumping in puddles with tennis shoes on. My shoes are soaked through to my socks, but I don’t seem to care. My friend, my cousin, he’s splashing with me, kicking water up to meet the rain with a smile spread across his face.

Someone gave him bright blue rainboots. His feet are bone dry.

Foggy windows caked with mud conceal the casket and the boy within. But I’m curious. I want to see what all the fuss is about.

I leave muddy footprints on the fine red carpet.

I stuff my pockets with mints.

I put my head down and scurry up to the casket.

Peering in, I don’t know what to expect.

Fresh angel wings?

A halo?

An empty box? 

I’m met with my cousin’s ashen face, still as candlewax.

For some reason, until this moment, my child-mind had not pondered what it really means to be identical. How is it that he is still and pallid in this box while his identical is leaping into puddles just outside these cold, brick walls? If they are identical, then how can one be alive and other dead? When they enter heaven, will one be a boy and the other a man? Will they no longer be identical?

A heavy hand comes to rest on my shoulder. From its mere presence, I can tell it’s my grandfather.

Perfect, I think, Grandpa will have all the answers to my questions.

I crane my neck up at him. My mouth opens, but the words won’t come. There’s a look on his face I have never seen before—one I’ve thought of everyday since.

The words he speaks next echo over the boundary waters of past and present, joy and pain, heaven and earth.

“Don’t ever let anybody tell you that this makes sense.”

*

Am I mad? Or the night?

With every step I take through this mess, I expect that:

● the charred trees will recede and a grand vista will open up before me and all will be light;

● I will guide their canoe to safety and the danger that lurks around every corner will be revealed and vanquished;

● I will overcome death;

● it will all make sense;

● it will mean something.

But light without darkness, candlewax without a flame, life without possibility… snoring, night fishing. Stupid.

*

My grandpa comes to visit me in the hospital. He cradles my hand in his. Though his skin has been desiccated by wind and time, there is still some strength in his grasp.

“Everything happens for a reason,” he says.

I chuckle, but quickly blame it on my confusion.

“Brain damage,” I say, afraid of seeing that look on his face again.

*

“I am” is a conceiving; “I am this” is a conceiving; “I shall be” is a conceiving; “I shall not be” is a conceiving; “I shall be possessed of form” is a conceiving; “I shall be formless” is a conceiving; “I shall be percipient” is a conceiving; “I shall be non-percipient” is a conceiving; “I shall be neither-percipient-nor-non-percipient” is a conceiving. Conceiving is a disease, conceiving is a tumour, conceiving is a dart. By overcoming all conceivings, bhikku, one is called a sage at peace. And the sage at peace is not born, does not age, does not die; he is not shaken and does not yearn. For there is nothing present in him by which he might be born. Not being born, how could he age? Not aging, how could he die? Not dying, how could he be shaken? Not being shaken, why would he yearn?

–The Buddha

All that remains between my boots and the water is a thin sliver of rock. I aim my light at what I think is the horizon, hoping against hope that they will see and paddle their way to shore.

My cynical heart harbors doubts.

On this island, there is no difference between identical twin realities: the pain and joy of life and death–whether they are panicked and paddling to a distant shore or breathless and blue at the bottom of the lake—-all that exists, all that has ever existed, is at the end of a point of light aimed at an all-consuming darkness.