I am born in the neighborhood pool, at twilight. It is one of those evenings at the end of summer when the water is so warm everyone calls it a bath and loses interest in swimming. The cicadas wail, sawing their way into the coming night, but no one else enters the water. It is only me in my black one piece, turning flips, floating on my back with the buoyancy of a prayer, feeling the dusk coming and coming. The pool lamps click on, casting a tranquil glow the color of light in a Hopper painting. From a chair on the side of the pool, my boyfriend watches me. He leans forward, his elbows on his knees, noticing. 

***

Now: I inhabit a ghost landscape, a territory pocked by a hailstorm of recollection. Memory tricks the mind, the way light flicks through vision, varnishing the edges of something not there. What is coming is an index of ghost spaces, places I exist before, but only there, only in the past. 

The girl flipping about in the lit pool as her boyfriend leers is gone now, as is my willingness to allow such a thing. But he is my only audience as I shed childhood like a shell and become something else, my eyes opened, the apple eaten. 

I wonder, is this first on item on a list of things I wish I didn’t know? 

***

Context: I sit on the porch swing, studying the light just before summer changes to fall. Everything green looks tired, dusty, as though it’s waiting on its own disintegration. This is when things quiet down. School goes back in session. Half the tourists return home. This is when something always falls apart. Summer’s end brings a startling, a clap of thunder on a blue afternoon. Birds take flight. There are squealing tires, broken glass. And, silence, again. This time a more thorough quiet. A leaving. 

I don’t know loneliness until A.’s passing. Her absence feels like walking from a dense wood into an open field, suddenly exposed, a whiplash of change. She is driving when a deer runs out in front of her car. She swerves and flips. Dies instantly. 

Oblivion would be easier, Margaret Renkl writes. I wish didn’t know what A.’s cold hand felt like. I wish I’d never gone to her viewing, saw her face shrouded in that cloth, sheer and blue as a faraway sea. I will always wonder: if I had not seen her broken body, felt the solidity of her form, would I be better prepared to embrace her ghost? 

***

Now: I perch on a bright boulder in the burn scar of a wildfire that tore through three years ago. The understory has begun to grow back wild and vibrant and born again, studded by ghost trees, a black fringe atop the ridge. I examine the river, thinking about what lies beneath its rippled surface. I wonder what the current would look like if I could spin ribbons of dye through the water, like barium in the body, lighting up the streams and passions running in its veins, offering up the internal workings of the world. 

These days, I tell myself the best thing to do while inside a difficult season is to observe its passing, not wait idly and beg for it to be over. Notice minutiae: the way a shredded trash bag caught in barbed wire transforms at sunset, its gossamer thinness a sudden glory in the last light. The brush strokes of wind on an ancient snow drift, dirty with age. The pastel ombre of winter twilight brimming the space between city silhouettes. Life is gaps, erosions, places I used to exist—depths and shallows, and the currents that flow between. 

***

Then: That summer, D. and I tell our feverish stories to the firelight, laughing and drinking. I don’t know then that the only thing I will remember is the light and sound of disappearance, the clarity of a bell, a lingering fragrance, the way a memory becomes a scorched place. Morning dew twinkles on the sage before it burns off. The sound of the creek pounds through the canyon at dusk, toward a ledge, a nowhere, a river, a sea. The stars tear through the blackness when everything else is quiet, and we lay together in a sleeping bag all night, just to hear the water before sun washes the sky of all evidence there was night. 

A Ferris wheel blooms on the horizon, arriving with the rodeo at the edge of that dusty western town. It is the last thing D. and I do before everything we do turns to sand or myth. It is before the floor in that hotel room, before my tiny tank top and D. kissing my neck on the hillside overlooking the butte. All of that comes a couple of weeks later, in the golden light, on my twenty-second birthday. No, this first: my denim miniskirt and white t-shirt, his pinky finger grazing my thigh as we sit. My flipflops dangle from my toes, and we go round and round, drunk but not yet in love. The whole world soars beneath us. 

Now: I want to fracture the image. I see a wheel with broken spokes. Pieces fling off, apart. Bolts work their way free and whirl away, somewhere off into the atmosphere. Entire shapes go missing, leaving only holes behind. The wheel spins so fast its center becomes a vortex, a compelling emptiness, an insatiable black hole consuming what is already gone. The threshold of this place is the beginning of the future. I rest my legs over the ledge, drop a flipflop into the abyss. 

A year after our ride on the Ferris wheel, my legs dangle over the bedside as D. stands looking at me, his face unwavering. I don’t love you. I never did, he says. 

***

Now: I see A. sometimes. Just this afternoon, a woman emerges from her Subaru with A.’s hair, her mannerisms. She holds the same kind of laugh behind her eyes, like the moment just before a cloud moves off the sun. This woman is real, of course, but she’s not really A., just the full and complete memory of her, manifested in a stranger. This is a passing, a drive by. It’s slippery, nothing I can hold onto. A.’s ghost is snow swirling and settling on the surface of a boulder, leaving behind the sudden knowledge of something missing. 

Did she hit the deer when she swerved? I wonder.  

***

Then: Water beads up on my tanned skin, my clavicle, my shoulders shaped from hours of swim practice. I feel suddenly alive, fully in my body, as though my bones and muscles fill my skin. As though I am watertight.

There’s a redundancy to watching him watch me, a lapsed or folded nostalgia, as though I am remembering myself through his eyes. The girl born in the pool no longer exists, so I must fish her out of a murky, recent past, unsubmerge her from the depths. I see the girl my boyfriend sees—she is disappearing even as she becomes.  

I float on my back, new breasts to the sky, as he watches. am both body and object, and I am becoming suddenly solid, irrevocably alive, pinned to the world like an arrow on the map announcing, you are here. I am both telescoped and larger than life. 

I don’t remember how the scene ends. Do I get out of the pool? Go home? Or does he leave first, and I walk back to my house, barefoot on the still-hot pavement to shower off the chlorine and slow the thrumming in my veins?

***

Now: I dream of walking a hall lined with broken photographs. Or, rather, the pictures are intact, but each one occupies a busted frame, glass splintering across the face inside. I turn a full circle, taking inventory of my memories. It makes me think, even inside this dreamscape, about shattered glass on the road. A. is here. Her photo hangs crooked on the plaster, her face radiant, shirt blue like the ocean. A web of glass stretches over her smile. 

How do I fix it? Any of it? Part of this dark acceptance is knowing I can’t. I wake in a cold sweat. 

***

Then: I lean back, and the water holds me, bears my weight, draws its line around me, a seam of water to skin, a thinness defining what is water and what is body. The sky above is a bruise, almost full darkness. 

***

Then: D. leans me back, his hand behind my head, mouth on my collarbone, shoulder. The TV looms above us, rolling credits from some movie, or perhaps a baseball game we’ve stopped watching. It’s one of those TVs with antennae on a tall pedestal with three feet, the kind you never see any more unless in a thrift store or pawn shop. The kind a gust of wind could knock over. 

My memory skips, flickers like a light bulb just before it burns out. It’s my birthday. I’m twenty-two and the sum of my waiting. It is all I am, all I have become. Until now. Here, on the floor at the foot of the bed—the hard floor with rough carpet I keep rubbing under my fingertips. 

***

There are holes in me the shape of memories, where events and people and places used to be. It’s as though everything has folded—a sheet of paper, gleaming white—and someone with scissors has cut triangles and hearts and diamonds in the folded page. Eventually I will open it and the snowflake will map for me all the geographies of wholeness, where it used to be. 

***

Then: D. and I, we sleep on the floor. There is no context, no reason. Just the lack of furniture, lack of commitment to buying any. We are young, and it doesn’t matter. The shape of the bed is the shape of the future: a diamond cut from white paper and let fall away, unnoticed. 

It is golden hour, end of summer. A shadow gathers on the edges of things, like dust on a glass lampshade. I still don’t know what starts the fight. Maybe we are just weary of each other’s company. We scream at each other, slam things, and eventually I leave. A few days later, D. drives up as if he’s been looking for me, as if he doesn’t know where I’ve gone, and tells he me we are done. He doesn’t love me, never has. 

Falling out of love is a movie in unhurried reverse: that beautiful west coast light marinates everything. D. and I, the only characters, return to where we’ve come from, like rainbow silk stuffed back into the sleeve of a magician. 

***

Now: I am fascinated by what my own mind deems holy—the symmetry of a pinecone, a sheer curtain billowing, lit by the first sun as it rises over the mountain. I became a photographer to use these irrelevant, beautiful moments for something. It’s how I feel about my past, too. Each individual memory is worth something. I don’t want these ghosts to go to waste. 

Few people teach me more about what I am doing with the camera than A. I don’t mean the technological aspects, but I find her in my mind’s eye. I think of her any time I explain myself or one of my photographs. She is the one I hope will read what I write, the one my captions are for. I want to show her what I see, my vision as I curate my work. 

I watch myself materialize as an artist, an adult. And, A., she buoys my creativity, encourages it to the surface like a girl floating weightless in the pool, watching the stars. Now that she’s gone, I don’t know the purpose of a photograph. There is no one to write letters to, full of bright lists, indexes of beauty, things I’ve seen that I wish I could show her. The full circle is broken. I want back what used to be. I don’t want A. to be one I have lost.

Her silence is a vacancy, a hunger. A carpet of dust in an old emptiness. It is also new earth, a seed dropped in a gutter, carried long and far to a flooded field. It is an evaporation, a freeing, a coming back, a dark redemption of the underside of things. She leaves behind a scar like the wildfire—a beautiful place deeply marked by the tragic collapse of loss. 

***

Then: Light marbles the water’s surface, casting mottled, golden lines on the ceiling of the indoor pool. This place is solace, water a covering. Across the street is a boy’s first home, his dorm room. It’s nearly winter. As the cold front passes through, a shelf of cloud slides off the sun, casting a clear, amber light on the far wall of the room. There is a microwave and a plastic-enveloped futon, and he thinks because I straddle him that he will have me, even though he doesn’t want me. Not like that. 

We are not together, this boy and me. He makes it clear I am not his. I am my body, and to him, I am infinite in my possibility, my muteness. My wanting to be seen. We make out, grope each other until he tells me to leave. I exit through the glass doors in the lobby downstairs, out into the glare, the air so crisp, the first cold a comfort as the sky moves east. I walk slowly to the pool across the street. 

That night at practice, there’s an amniotic quality to the water. Tears come easily behind my goggles, as I swim lap after lap prescribed by the coach. In this womb, no one can tell the expression on my face or the leaking from my eyes or that I am sad, not because of the boy and the sun and the deep light in his bedroom, but because he has made me a vacancy, unseen me. He has put his eyes, hands on me, and I have become void. I imagine the water parting as I swim wall to wall, leaving an empty wake behind me, the sea splitting to reveal a scorched landscape. I am ineffectual. I am surprised the water does not pass through me, split me like a ghost leaving the body. 

The sky darkens. Night comes. And the pool settles into a turquoise peace. I shower and drive home, wondering what I have done, becoming undone this way by a boy who does not return my feelings. This is how my desire to be seen becomes a liability. 

***

Now: I long for the opposite of water. I want something of A. to become solid again, like the floor at the foot of the bed or my boyfriend’s gaze or the wall of the dorm room where I lose a piece of myself. I want something of her to remain. But memory is all I have. A. tells me she loves me every time we leave each other. It is ritual: she makes eye contact, pulls me close. I cling to this version of her before she was ghost. 

Perhaps the point of foundness I am looking for lies at the center of the Ferris wheel two decades ago. Perhaps that is the first moment of my adulthood, the next meaningful scene after I am born in the pool. It is the last moment I am fixed, and since then things have been breaking off the wheel. Both erosion and entropy work their mighty influence. Bolts back out of their holes, tumble to the dirt and sage below. A piece of glass works itself loose from the broken frame, falls to the hallway floor, tinkling an echo across the expanse of unpunctuated time. My flipflop drops. A billow of dust rises below. And, still, the past goes round and round.

***

Now: my clearest memory is of A. lining her eyes in the bathroom one afternoon at work. It’s as astonishing to me now as it was then: the effortless way she takes the eyeliner in one hand and draws first on her lower lid, then the upper. I’ve never seen anything this casually beautiful before, her reflection in the mirror, me next to her, just watching. 

I am the witness, now—my boyfriend from years ago is long gone. A.’s beauty emerges in the mirror before me. The line around her eyes is thin, like a line of water meeting skin. As I watch her, I understand that A. is the remedy to something I haven’t yet realized is broken. That I don’t know the difference between being watched and being seen until she shows me. A.’s sudden goneness takes my breath away, leaving me longing for the solidity of a wall, a floor, the promise of the continuous line drawn around her eyes. The realness of the words I love you. I always will.