The last section of the embankment dam settled into place with the finality of a period at the end of a long sentence. A previously unremarkable branch of the Trinity River surrendered to human engineering, its waters beginning to pool behind the barrier that would redefine the landscape. This was 1965—a year of thresholds crossed and boundaries redrawn. While Malcolm X fell to an assassin’s bullet in New York, American astronauts walked in space for the first time, their tethers connecting them to a world spinning through simultaneous revolutions. Half a world away, the quagmire in Vietnam deepened as the evening news brought distant conflict into suburban living rooms.
Sixty miles east of Dallas, where the sandy soil of Texas gradually surrendered to moisture, something equally transformative was occurring at a different pace. The dirt became saturated, then viscous, then finally surrendered to the inevitable rise of water. What had been pasture and woodland began its slow metamorphosis into the body of water that would become known as Cedar Creek Lake. The transformation was both geological and psychological—another American landscape reshaped for human purposes, another natural boundary overcome.
This moment in 1965 existed at a peculiar intersection of control and chaos. We could engineer rivers and send men floating in the vacuum of space, yet couldn’t prevent bullets from finding their targets or avoid entanglement in distant conflicts. The dam represented both our arrogance and our optimism—the belief that we could shape nature to our needs while events beyond our control shaped our destinies.
The water didn’t rise quickly. It gathered with the patience of geological time, ignoring human schedules and historical milestones. As the lakebed softened and accepted its new identity, the world continued its frantic pace. The contrast was almost philosophical: humanity rushing forward while nature gradually settled into its new form. This emerging lake would become both a refuge from that rushing world and a mirror reflecting it—a still surface hiding depths of memory and meaning that would only reveal themselves decades later.
What began as a engineering project would become a repository for family stories, a backdrop for childhood summers, and eventually a symbol of something both gained and lost. The water rising behind that dam wasn’t just hydrating dry Texas soil; it was preparing to preserve moments and memories that would outlast the concrete that contained it.
The Architecture of Escape
By 1975, the water had settled into its permanent contours. Cedar Creek Lake held its shape with the resigned certainty of a finished thing, its surface reflecting not just sky but the weight of a decade’s history. That same year, my grandfather Bob decided to build a house on its shore.
Bob was a man assembled from contradictions. A WWII veteran who carried shrapnel in his thigh and silence in his heart. A flight engineer for American Airlines who spent more time above clouds than on solid ground. A Massachusetts jock who never lost his coastal accent but had long since misplaced whatever home felt like. He understood machinery better than people—could dismantle and reassemble an engine with his eyes closed, but found the emotional mechanics of family life perplexingly opaque.
His garage was a sanctuary of tangible problems. Here, everything could be taken apart, examined, and put back together correctly. The satisfying click of components fitting precisely where they belonged. The smell of oil and metal and solitary concentration. This was a language he spoke fluently, unlike the messy, unpredictable dialect of domestic life that seemed to clip his wings even as it provided the perch.
There’s a particular restlessness that afflicts certain men—this persistent sense that real life exists somewhere else, just beyond the horizon. Not necessarily a better life, but a different one. A life where they might recognize themselves in the mirror. My grandfather felt this pull deeply, this gravitational attraction to elsewhere.
But he was, at his core, a responsible man. He wouldn’t abandon his family, wouldn’t trade his actual life for some hypothetical alternative. So he did what responsible restless men do: he built a compromise. A place close enough to home yet far enough from daily obligations. A simulacrum of escape that required only a two-hour drive rather than permanent departure.
The lake house became his methadone—just enough of the fantasy to quiet the craving without fully surrendering to it. A carefully measured dose of elsewhere administered at regular intervals. He could stand on that unfinished deck, smell the water, watch the birds dive for fish, and for a few precious hours, feel like someone slightly different. Someone unburdened by mortgages and dental appointments and the accumulated weight of being a particular person in a particular life.
He built the place with his own hands—not as a contractor would, but as an engineer might. Considering angles of repose and weight distribution and how the light would fall at different hours. The practical considerations served as scaffolding for the emotional architecture he was constructing—a place where he could temporarily exist outside his own biography.
What’s fascinating about these escape hatches we build is how quickly others find them. The very isolation that makes them precious also makes them vulnerable to colonization. Within seasons, his children would bring friends to splash in the water he’d sought for quiet contemplation. His wife would arrange the kitchen to her specifications, plant flowers along the path to the dock, and generally make the place feel, well, like home. The very thing he’d built it to escape.
He surrendered his refuge with surprisingly little resistance. The same man who would battle wasps with focused intensity seemed to accept the human invasion with a shrug. Perhaps he recognized that no physical space can remain pure fantasy forever. Or maybe he understood that the real escape wasn’t the place itself, but the act of building it—the months of planning and measuring and creating something from nothing.
What remains in memory isn’t the finished structure but the process of its becoming. The smell of fresh-cut lumber mixing with lake air. The satisfaction of driving the last nail. The quiet moment alone before anyone else arrived, when the place existed only as potential. That moment contained all the freedom he’d ever need.
The house would eventually become something else entirely—a family gathering place, a repository of memories, a site of intergenerational negotiation. But in those first months, it existed exactly as intended: as one man’s carefully constructed argument with his own restlessness, built board by board on the edge of water that refused to stay still.
The Invasion of Sanctuary
Bob’s carefully constructed refuge began its subtle transformation almost immediately. The lake house, conceived as a solitary escape, proved irresistible to others. His children arrived first, bringing with them the very domestic chaos he sought to evade. They came with friends and lovers in tow, their laughter echoing across the water that was meant to absorb only quiet contemplation. The wooden deck, where Bob had imagined sitting alone with his thoughts, became a stage for teenage dramas and romantic entanglements.
My grandmother Jackie established her territory with quiet determination. She claimed the closets, organizing them with military precision that would have made her WWII veteran husband proud. The refrigerator became her domain, stocked with provisions that spoke of family gatherings rather than solitary retreats. She hung curtains in patterns Bob would never have chosen and placed decorative items on surfaces he preferred bare. Her conquest was complete, bloodless, and utterly effective.
What surprised me most, hearing these stories years later, was Bob’s acquiescence. The man who would hunt mud daubers with relentless efficiency, who could dismantle and reassemble complex machinery, offered no resistance to this human invasion. He watched his sanctuary become a shared space with what family members described as a curious detachment. Perhaps he recognized that some invasions cannot be fought with tools from a garage, or maybe he understood that the very concept of a private escape was flawed from the beginning.
The lake community that grew around them developed its own peculiar character. These weren’t weekend visitors but permanent residents who had chosen to live at the water’s edge year-round. They became supporting characters in our family’s lake narrative, fixtures in the landscape of our summer memories.
Kyle lived two properties down, a boy about ten years my senior who moved with the awkward grace of someone who had negotiated life with a prosthetic leg since birth. The mechanical limb had its own distinct odor, a combination of sweat, plastic, and effort that announced his presence before he rounded the corner of the dock. His younger sister developed an intense fascination with me, following my movements with silent devotion that both flattered and unnerved my pre-adolescent self.
Then there was Hans, an elderly German immigrant whose past unfolded in reluctant fragments over years of casual conversation. He had been a sausage maker by trade, but more intriguingly, he had been a member of the Hitler Youth in his childhood. He spoke of this period with neither pride nor shame, but with the flat tone of someone describing weather patterns from long ago. The moral complexities of his past seemed to have been smoothed away by decades of lake living and sausage making.
Perhaps most unexpectedly, there was Red, a man whose taciturn nature concealed a remarkable history. He had helped develop the stealth bomber, though he would only mention this fact after several beers, and even then with minimal detail. He spoke in short, clipped sentences that seemed designed to discourage further inquiry. We children regarded him with awe, imagining that his quiet demeanor hid secrets of national importance.
These individuals formed the backdrop against which our summer visits unfolded. To us, they were permanent residents of this alternative reality, while we were temporary visitors. Our annual arrivals must have seemed like minor earthquakes in their otherwise stable landscape—brief, disruptive, then gone. We would tumble out of our car after the long drive from Arlington, bringing with us the energy and noise of suburban life, troubling the surface of their peaceful existence before vanishing again until the next year.
I often wondered how they perceived us. Did we seem like exotic annual migrants, bursting with stories of a world they had chosen to leave behind? Or were we merely a seasonal nuisance, interrupting the quiet rhythm of lake life with our transient demands for attention and entertainment?
The dynamics of these relationships were complex and unspoken. Kyle, despite his physical challenges, taught me to skip stones across the lake’s surface. Hans would sometimes offer slices of sausage from his latest kitchen experiment. Red might nod in our direction, the slightest acknowledgment of our presence. These small interactions formed the fragile bridge between their permanent reality and our temporary escape.
Looking back, I see how Bob’s retreat had become something entirely different from his original vision. The lake house wasn’t a solitary escape but a connecting point—a place where different lives briefly intersected. His children formed summer romances there, his wife established a second domain separate from their suburban home, and odd characters from the lake’s edge became part of our family mythology.
Perhaps Bob’s silent retreat wasn’t surrender but a gradual recognition that no man’s escape can remain purely his own. The very act of building a place of beauty invites others to share in it. His garage tinkering had been about control—taking things apart and putting them back together exactly as he wished. But life, especially life by a lake, resists such precise reassembly.
The invaders he allowed to occupy his sanctuary ultimately gave the place its richness and texture. Without them, it might have remained just a building near water rather than becoming what it did—a living, breathing space where multiple stories intertwined, where a WWII veteran’s escape became the backdrop for childhood memories, summer romances, and the quiet dramas of lakeside residents.
Bob’s greatest engineering achievement wasn’t the construction itself, but the unintended creation of a space where so many different lives could momentarily float together before drifting back to their separate currents.
The Education of Fear
The lake house came with its own curriculum of dangers, taught not through textbooks but through the steady stream of warnings that flowed from my mother’s lips. This education began each morning with the same ritual: we’d step onto the sun-warmed deck, and the lessons would commence.
Her voice carried a particular tone when cataloging hazards—not quite alarmed, but persistently cautionary, as if reading from some invisible safety manual only she could see. “Watch for spiders in the toolshed,” she’d say, her eyes scanning the weathered wooden structure that leaned slightly to one side. “They hide in the corners and behind the fishing gear.”
The dock became a geography of potential injuries. “Splinters everywhere,” she’d note, pointing at the grayed planks that stretched over the water. “Some are long as needles. If one gets in your foot, we’ll have to dig it out with the tweezers from the first aid kit.” She described this process with such specificity that I could already feel the phantom pain.
But the true source of apprehension lay beneath the water’s surface. “The lake bottom isn’t smooth,” she explained. “There are sharp objects buried in the muck—old fishing hooks, broken bottles, pieces of metal from who knows what.” She spoke of these hidden dangers as if they were deliberately waiting for unsuspecting feet.
The warnings took on mythological proportions when she discussed water moccasins. These snakes moved through the shallows with sinister purpose, she said. They could kill a swimming dog in minutes or incapacitate a grown man with their venom. Her stories featured neighbors’ pets that had vanished after quick strikes, and fishermen who had narrowly escaped with their lives. The snakes became creatures of legend in my mind—shadowy, silent, and always nearby.
When my nana joined these safety sessions, the warnings arrived in stereo. They’d sit together in the shade of the porch, sweating beers sheathed in bait-shop-branded koozies, their voices weaving together in a chorus of concern. The heat itself became dangerous—the dock boards could burn bare feet, they cautioned, while the cool grass hid its own threats: biting insects, stray nails scattered like landmines, fire ant mounds waiting to erupt.
Gradually, something shifted in how I heard these warnings. The constant recitation of potential harms began to sound less like protection and more like prediction. The line between “be careful or you might get hurt” and “you will get hurt” blurred until I couldn’t distinguish caution from certainty.
By the time I turned twelve, their teachings had taken root deep within me. I no longer needed their warnings because I had internalized them completely. I developed routines of avoidance: testing each dock plank before putting weight on it, scanning the grass before sitting, hesitating at the water’s edge before entering. The world had transformed from a place of play to a landscape of potential injuries.
On the rare occasions when I did get hurt—a splinter from the rail, a cut from a hidden shell—the pain felt almost expected, as if I had merely fulfilled a prophecy they had written long ago. The sting of peroxide was accompanied by the unspoken “I told you so” that hung in the air thicker than the humidity.
Looking back, I wonder if their constant warnings served another purpose beyond protection. Perhaps they needed us to get hurt occasionally, if only to validate the enormous energy they spent on worrying. A minor injury would prove their vigilance necessary, their fears justified. In trying to keep us safe, they may have needed the world to remain dangerous.
This education in fear became so thorough that I began to see threats where none existed. The creak of the porch swing sounded like impending collapse. The normal ache of sun-warmed muscles felt like the onset of some mysterious lake-borne illness. Even the innocent bubbles rising from the lake bottom took on sinister implications—what unseen danger might they signal?
The lake itself, once a source of endless fascination, became a thing to be approached with calculation rather than spontaneity. I’d dip a toe first, then wait, as if testing whether the water itself might decide to become hazardous today. The joyful abandon of childhood swimming gave way to measured strokes and constant vigilance.
This careful approach prevented some temporary pains, certainly. I avoided the worst splinters, never stepped on a fishing hook, never encountered the legendary water moccasins. But the cost was a constant undercurrent of anxiety that colored every lake experience. I had learned to navigate physical dangers so well that I didn’t notice I was drowning in apprehension.
The true lesson of this education wasn’t about avoiding specific hazards—it was about learning to see the world as fundamentally dangerous, and myself as perpetually vulnerable. They had taught me how to stay safe, but in doing so, they had also taught me how to be afraid.
The Inheritance of Fear
Middle age arrives with its own peculiar shade, a sagging quietude where I find myself sitting exactly where my mother once sat, watching children play near water’s edge. My foot taps an anxious rhythm as the sun arcs overhead, each movement of those small bodies triggering silent alarms wired deep within my nervous system. I’ve worn my mother’s eyes for so long that the world now presents itself as fundamentally hostile – every surface potentially splintered, every shadow potentially hiding, every body of water holding unseen dangers beneath its shimmering surface.
The vast world where I once played and got hurt and grew has been shrinking gradually into claustrophobia, compressed by the accumulated weight of inherited worry. What began as reasonable caution metastasized into a worldview, a permanent filter through which I process experience. To avoid the splintered wood of the boat dock is to prevent temporary pain, but this mindset can grow into something far more limiting – a lifetime of groping around in the empty storeroom of what-ifs, always anticipating disaster rather than engaging with possibility.
Sitting in the shade and sipping beer soothes immediate discomfort, but at what cost? For that question, I have the devastating answer of my mother’s life. She was swallowed by waters far darker and more sinister than any danger the lake ever held – the slow, relentless tide of alcoholism that crept higher year after year until it finally closed over her head. Her warnings about external dangers became a tragic irony when the real threat was the very liquid she poured into glasses, the substance she used to quiet the same anxieties she passed to me.
Those dark waters did not fully engulf me, though they tried. In the name of the sobriety I’ve been desperate to protect, I’ve doubled down on my most anxious tendencies, building fortresses where perhaps simple shelters would suffice. The loudest voice I hear belongs to fear, often arriving in stereo as if shouted down from the shadows of that lake house porch, a permanent transmission from the past.
I’ve constructed walls all around me, put a roof over my head to shield from elements, and locked myself inside behind heavy doors without even allowing the pleasure of a window facing the water. This place I’ve built feels less like protection and more like a crypt – secure, perhaps, but airless and dark. I don’t even go swimming anymore, though I live surrounded by water. The inheritance of fear has become a self-imposed limitation that shapes every decision, every hesitation, every moment of holding back when leaning in might bring joy.
The tragedy of this protection racket reveals itself in slow motion: we think we’re building barriers against pain, but often we’re just constructing better cages. My mother’s warnings about water moccasins and sharp objects embedded in lake muck weren’t wrong about those specific dangers, but they missed the larger truth that some risks are worth taking, that temporary pain is preferable to permanent caution, that a life focused entirely on prevention becomes a life half-lived.
Now I recognize the same patterns emerging in my own watchfulness, the way my gaze follows children with that particular intensity that communicates danger even when my mouth stays silent. The cycle continues unless consciously interrupted – the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next, not through dramatic events but through daily interactions, through tone of voice, through the subtle language of apprehension that children learn to speak fluently.
Breaking this inheritance requires recognizing that protection and imprisonment often use the same materials, that the same walls that keep danger out also keep life out. The work involves learning to distinguish between reasonable caution and pathological fear, between teaching safety and teaching anxiety. It means understanding that my mother’s warnings came from love but were filtered through her own unhealed wounds, her own relationship with danger and escape.
These days, I’m practicing the difficult art of lowering the drawbridge, of allowing some risk back into the equation, of remembering that not all uncertainty leads to harm. Sometimes protection becomes its own kind of danger, and the safest-seeming path can be the one that leads to the slowest demise. The real work isn’t about building better walls but about developing better discernment, learning when to caution and when to encourage, when to protect and when to release.
The water remains, both literally and metaphorically, and the choice continues: to see it as primarily dangerous or primarily nourishing, as threat or opportunity. My inheritance includes both the fear and the memory of floating, both the warnings and the moment of weightless trust. The balancing continues, the difficult negotiation between protection and freedom that defines so much of parenting and living.
Perhaps the healthiest inheritance I can offer isn’t the elimination of fear but the demonstration of courage, not perfect safety but resilient recovery. The goal isn’t to never get hurt but to never stop living fully because hurt might happen. The work continues: to honor the protective instinct without being ruled by it, to acknowledge danger without being defined by it, to build homes with windows facing the water.
The Texture of Memory
Bob’s mind began its slow retreat during my high school years, though the signs had been gathering long before the official diagnosis. There was a particular look in his eyes—not vacant, but focused on some distant point beyond the walls of his Arlington home. He would sit for hours in that black leather recliner, staring into the living room with an intensity that suggested he was waiting for something important to arrive. We didn’t know it then, but he was already beginning his journey back to the water.
The red Nissan pickup became his time machine. That truck held its own memories for me—the scent of oil and old leather, the stubborn gearshift he’d taught me to work with patient hands, the way the engine complained on cold mornings. When he disappeared in that truck for a week, it felt both terrifying and somehow inevitable. They found him near the Oklahoma border, disoriented but calm. When asked what he had been doing all those days, his answer was simple and heartbreaking: “I was just trying to go to the lake.
That final attempted pilgrimage marked the end of an era. Within eight years, both my grandparents were gone, and the lake house passed to their children. The transfer of ownership felt like watching the slow dissolution of a dream. My uncle eventually sold the property, and in the tradition of Texas real estate, I’m certain the house Bob built with his own hands has been replaced by something larger, more modern, and utterly characterless. The physical structure is gone, but its essence persists in the most unexpected ways.
Memory has a physicality that outlasts lumber and nails. Even now, I can catch the faintest hint of my nana’s perfume lingering on imaginary couch cushions. The vinyl tiles on the floor looked like giant crackers, their pattern worn smooth in the high-traffic areas. The sliding door had its own particular yawn as it opened and closed, a sound that signaled transitions between lake life and indoor life. The stairs to the loft complained with specific creaks on each step, creating a musical code that told you who was ascending or descending.
The liquor cabinet held its own stories—bottles that grew gradually more diluted as the summer progressed, their contents sacrificed to countless sweating glasses. The empty boat lift stood like a modern art sculpture, its U-shaped harnesses waiting for a weight they would never again hold. Director’s chairs served as makeshift barstools, their canvas backs bearing the imprints of countless visitors. The VHS player and its collection of old cartoon tapes represented a different kind of time capsule, one that could transport us backward in thirty-minute increments.
Brown water, pink shoulders, rough grass, eternal sun—these fragments surface without warning, triggered by some sensory cue in my daily life. The memories remain so vivid they sometimes startle me with their intensity. I can still feel the sun’s heat on the dock boards, smell the peculiar combination of diesel fuel and sunscreen that defined summer mornings, hear the particular slap of water against the boat hull.
What surprises me most isn’t that I remember these things, but how they continue to shape my present. The lake house exists now as a collection of sensory impressions, each one tied to some emotional truth about family and safety and the strange ways we try to protect what we love. The physical structure may be gone, but its lessons remain encoded in my nervous system, emerging when I least expect them.
The destruction of the house feels like a metaphor for something larger—the inevitable erosion of physical landmarks that hold our memories. Yet the persistence of those memories suggests that the important things were never really in the walls or roof anyway. They were in the way the light fell through the windows at certain hours, in the particular sound of laughter echoing across water, in the shared silence of people watching a sunset together.
Sometimes I wonder if the new owners feel the echoes of what happened there. Do they sense the ghost of my grandfather puttering in what was once his garage? Do they ever wake to the faint smell of perfume that doesn’t belong to anyone in their family? Probably not. Houses absorb our stories quietly, holding them in their walls without revealing them to newcomers.
What remains most vividly is the understanding that places aren’t just locations—they’re repositories of emotion. The lake house contained generations of hope and disappointment, fear and courage, escape and return. Its physical disappearance doesn’t erase those layers; if anything, it intensifies them, distilling the experience down to its essential elements.
I find myself cataloging these memories not from nostalgia, but from a need to understand how places shape us. The lake house taught me about the tension between safety and freedom, about how we build structures both physical and psychological to contain our lives. Its loss feels appropriate in a way—a reminder that nothing lasts, but also that nothing is ever truly lost if it’s woven into the fabric of who we become.
The brown water still floats somewhere in my memory, holding me up when I forget how to trust the world. The rough grass still pricks at my sense of security. The eternal sun still warms parts of me that grew cold in its absence. These aren’t just memories; they’re living things that continue to shape my relationship with risk and safety and the complicated business of being alive.
The Moment of Weightlessness
Kyle’s voice cut through the humid air with unexpected patience. My parents were elsewhere, absorbed in that particular adult oblivion that occasionally granted children moments of true freedom. The lake stretched out around us, brown and mysterious, holding its secrets beneath a surface that shimmered with afternoon light.
“Okay,” he said, his tone measured, as if explaining something simple yet profound. “Go like you’re falling backwards, and let your legs and arms float up. Spread them out wide and don’t squirm. If you squirm, you’ll sink.” He demonstrated with an economy of movement that seemed remarkable for someone navigating the water with a prosthetic leg. The stump of his missing limb thrashed slightly as he worked to steady himself, creating small ripples that expanded across the water’s surface.
I watched him become buoyant, his body surrendering to the lake’s embrace. There was something in that moment that felt like witnessing a secret—a vulnerability that his usual tough exterior concealed. Kyle had mastered this element in a way that seemed to defy the limitations everyone else saw.
“Now you try,” he said, his eyes holding mine with an intensity that felt both challenging and reassuring.
I mimicked his movements, my body stiff with apprehension. The water felt different when you weren’t fighting it—cooler, more substantial somehow. Kyle moved beside me, his hands slipping under my back, lifting me slightly. The water lapped at my cheeks, and I felt that familiar panic rising—the one my mother’s warnings had planted deep within me.
“I’m gonna let you go now, okay Cam?”
“I don’t want you to. I’ll drown.”
The words came out smaller than I intended, childlike and afraid. All those warnings about water moccasins and sharp objects embedded in the muck suddenly felt very present, very real.
“You won’t drown,” Kyle said, his voice steady. No condescension, no impatience—just simple certainty.
“Will the catfish bite me?”
“No, catfish won’t bite you.”
There was a pause filled only with the sound of water gently moving around us. I looked at Kyle’s face, saw the faint scar above his eyebrow, the sun-bleached hair sticking to his forehead. He wasn’t looking at me like I was fragile or breakable. He was looking at me like I was capable.
“Okay,” I said, the word barely more than an exhale.
He took his hands away.
My eyes squeezed shut in anticipation of sinking, of the brown water closing over my head. But instead, something remarkable happened. The water held me. My limbs drifted upward as if pulled by invisible strings, and I became weightless, suspended between the lake bottom and the sky above.
“Whoa,” I thought, the word forming silently in my mind. “This is what it’s like to fly!”
The fear didn’t vanish so much as transform into something else—a thrilling awareness of my body in space, of the water’s support, of the possibility that maybe not everything was as dangerous as I’d been taught.
I opened my eyes to a world turned upside down. The sky stretched out beneath me, vast and blue, while the sun burned hot and distant above. My ears were submerged, creating that peculiar underwater silence that makes everything seem both muffled and amplified. I could hear my own heartbeat, the gentle movement of water, the distant call of a bird.
Kyle watched me, a slight smile touching his lips. “See? You’re floating.”
And I was. Not fighting, not struggling, not afraid—just floating. A temporary island in the brown water, held by something I couldn’t see but could feel with every part of my being.
That moment became etched in memory not because of any dramatic event, but because of its perfect simplicity. The fear, the trust, the surrender, and finally, the weightlessness. It was one of those rare instances when the world makes sense on its own terms, without need for explanation or analysis.
Years later, I would understand that what Kyle taught me wasn’t just how to float in water, but how to float in life. That sometimes the way through fear isn’t to fight it, but to spread your arms and legs wide, to stop squirming, and to let yourself be held by whatever it is that holds you.
The memory of that suspended moment returns often—when life feels heavy, when fear threatens to pull me under, when I find myself building walls instead of learning to float. I close my eyes and remember the sensation of weightlessness, the surprise of being held, the discovery that sometimes safety isn’t about protection from the water, but about learning how to float in it.
That afternoon with Kyle became a touchstone—a reminder that beneath all the warnings and fears and constructed protections, there remains the possibility of weightlessness, of trust, of floating. The water that seemed so threatening became, for a few precious moments, the very thing that held me up.
And in that suspension, between the bottom and the surface, between fear and freedom, I discovered something essential about memory itself—that the moments we truly float are the ones that never really sink into the past, but remain buoyant in our minds, available to us when we need them most.
