You Will Be Like Water

i.

Amar’s outpost was made magical by the mood she set. A semi-permeable poetic openness to the other, equal, part of nature. She’d had enough of subpar dwellings in college. For graduate school, she needed a place where she could bring her whole being. A Magic Mountain where she could recover — from what, she wasn’t certain, short of the miracle and trauma of her life’s first quarter century.
All she knew of Indiana — that it was where John Mellencamp was from. So she imagined she’d spot him cruising down main street in a vintage convertible singing a ditty about Jack and Diane. But the southern-facing Indiana region proved more subtle.
In its beauty: sudden ridges and gorges, the hidden secrets of geodes or limestone fossil rocks. And its unexpected effect on her: a surreptitious romancing in the earth beneath her and a conspiring wind all about. Her cat sensed it, too. Her newfound lightness of being invited a mood and movement pulling her into a story not entirely of her making. Landing her far off campus, twenty minutes by country road. To a lake.
Varying clusters of wood-clad condominiums were built surprisingly close to the trees on the slopes of the hills by the water. Her third floor unit, nearly level with the tree tops, jutted into the woods. A lofted great room with wide sliding doors opened to a generous deck that co-mingled with the wind and rain, and elements, the trees and birds and squirrels: an Amazon assortment of insects, a rare red fox at dawn, a just-past-dusk flying squirrel, and jewel-toned Indigo buntings in the spring. There she lived with her familiar, Miyazaki, an adventurous cat. Miya maintained a measure of aloofness while accompanying her on walks, but was not above chasing her snowballs in the deep snow. Together, they watched the changing constancy of the sun and water and trees.
Nature leaked into her great room. There, Amar soaked among the wind and chimes, and luxuriated in the ocean sway of trees. During thunderstorms, she’d take center seat to watch them transform into mythic dancers, whose frighteningly beautiful light shows — the static, alternating, and unpredictable flickering of positive and negative wood-block tree images — mesmerized her. There, all things blurred and melded in and out of liquid forms conforming to the curvilinear lines of her longing. It is where Jonathan would appear, and soon propose, in a silent promise of ocean blue eyes.
Two complementary shapes dominated her small, otherwise unremarkable bedroom. A decorative textile, red-and-pink mandala, spanning the far wall, and a queen-sized mattress floating centrally like a magic carpet. There, a strange and memorable, gymnastic-erotic choreography marked their period of engagement.

ii.

On a too-early and too-cold morning in Vermont — her roused state somewhere between a drugged mental patient and cheerful marionette — Amar dressed methodically, her brain as anxious as her body was unsure, about the impending event:  ice climbing a frozen waterfall. She had hardly climbed before. It was an unexpected shock.
However, she’d planned on a special visit with her friend Sara months before she’d ever met Jon. She had already bought the ticket to Boston. It was only a few days. Still, as if torn from a twin, she fought consternation and dissonance: thinking of Jon, their warm bed, their growing love, and their commitment to marry in the fall.
Now, she was overstuffed in winter layers, gesturing stiffly and barely conversing with Sara, as she picked at her blueberry muffin at the only restaurant open. Her numbed sense of self muted the obvious: a chain of trust by friendship in this adventure with experienced climbers — Amar’s commitment to her friend, Sara; Sara’s to her boyfriend, Brady; and all three of them, by proxy, to Brady’s friend, Ethan.
Every brittle sound that had swished, cracked, and crunched on the bitter cold drive to the site was now under foot. The sub-zero conditions dried and tightened her eyes and nose, and further tamped her mood, heightening her awareness of the cold metal band around her finger.
They fastened spiked ice shoes called crampons to their feet and started up the trail. Brady and Ethan led the way up the minor mountain’s path and through the tree slope flanking the waterfall. Minus the generated warmth of exertion, Amar hadn’t paid more than cursory attention to her surroundings before she found herself already there. She stepped onto the flat, hard ice. On the deep, mid-tier ledge of the fall, the view opened up to a clear day with windswept stratus clouds. Behind them was the impressive frozen and bulging vertical ice wall.
Brady continued toward the upper tree slope to set the line. Ethan remained behind on the ledge with Sara and Amar. He mounted the face of the frozen waterfall, each crampon piercing precise footholds. He swung the curved, serrated edge of his ice axe like he was casting a fishing line, each blow sunk authoritatively into the mound. Amar noticed his over-exuberance; after the first swing, he had dangled in a bid for attention. He descended backwards in similar fashion, then in casual dismount joined Brady in his charge.
As Amar sensed the others too jovial for the task, an inner discord grew. She turned, stood at the outcrop’s edge, and looked away. A non-synchronous feeling bellowed between the actions and conversations of the day and her nervous brain; between the lived experience and a gravitational pull toward the many, unsaid things; between the sounds she was actually hearing and the one sound she didn’t want to hear, rehearsed compulsively like a prayer. She had no idea how quickly she’d recognize it.
The sound of slipping.
Her private foothold that day was a list whose sole box remained unchecked every moment she didn’t hear it. The sound of nylon scraping over ice.
“Amar — move back!” Sara yelled. Amar buckled backwards as an ice axe flew overhead.
Then, Sara, who’d been at the back of the ledge, saw what Amar only felt, the silence of Ethan vaulting over her head, landing with a thump so hard it prevented further slide. They stared, shocked by the spectacle.
His body was splayed face down at the precipice’s edge. They didn’t know if he was alive until they heard him gasp for a breath Sara thought might be his last. A moan emerged as he tried to move. Sara, listening to Brady scrambling madly down the icy side slope, prayed the casualties would not double. She prayed again after they urged him on to ice-scramble straight down to get help. Sara and Amar moved cautiously toward Ethan.
“Don’t move,” they uttered. No sense asking if he’s okay; something had to be very wrong. He moved again.
“Ethan, what are you doing?” Sara pleaded.
“Trying to get up. C’mon, let’s get outa here,” he said. Amar and Sara exchanged looks.
“Wait,” he added, laying his head back down. The eyes of his attendants grew wider.
“There’s something clunking around down there … I can hear it.”
They knew it wasn’t that Saturday’s utter silence outside, nor Brady’s now distant heroics. They knew it wasn’t Ethan’s neck, but it could have been his legs or back. They learned later his pelvis had shattered on impact.
“I need a cigarette,” he said, taking a different tack.
“Auhh … probably not a good idea,” Sara said. “It’ll act as a vasoconstrictor …” she whispered to Amar.
 Ethan’s odd behavior led Amar to a different conclusion.
“Let him have it. He’s in shock. Maybe it’ll comfort him.”
They lit a cigarette, allowing a few token puffs. Then, recalling they were on ice in sub-zero weather, they removed their coats to cover him, and waited themselves without jackets for three hours, trying to keep him conscious and warm.
Brady returned with volunteer help. Though, after Sara had to intervene in a first-aid task he was having trouble with and they surmised him inebriated, the stretcher he brought up the mountain was essential to the venture down, which was a bigger challenge. Soldiering all available muscles and every last bit of adrenaline to the task, they moved in makeshift formation down the steep and slippery slope in precarious and time-sensitive cycles of setting pulley lines and steadying the stretcher, trying to avoid a fatal slide or fumble.
Making their descent more difficult, Ethan entered hypothermia on the way down, shaking like a fresh caught fish on a trampoline, before his systems began to shut down. After a long night at a remote rural hospital, he lived.

iii.

Returning to Jon, Amar’s story emerged in between delirious states. A high fever burned inside her and left the sheets cold. The silent and rigid grip of Jon’s embrace exposed a vast unconscious geography of the pre-combinatory complexities that had informed their union, foretelling a stiff and stilted sway of the more primitive dance to come.
Jon was glad Amar was home and safe — and his again. But internally, he was irate at the dangerous foolishness he’d been unable to protect her from, or control. He struggled to control the competition of emotions that now steeped in full, subtle display. The unmistakable edges of anger, bitterness, and sheer confusion, seeped through and sullied his first opportunity to provide Amar with comfort on the occasion of her first expression of need. Trust’s tide reversed and pooled in a few secure, but stagnant places.
Rent increased on the apartment with the great room. They left behind the sliding doors that opened to the unexpected. They moved to the city, married in the fall, then fell, against their intelligent inclinations, into the slippery stereotypes and comfortable avoidances that, over time — exacerbated by the stresses of raising children, holding down jobs, and evenings greeted by a welcoming committee of alcoholic drinks — created ridges and grooves that played over-familiar tunes.
A trace dew of perennial discomfort overlaid their otherwise beautiful family.
Twenty years passed. As the ice climbing accident resurfaced for the first time, three perspectives circled like petals around a central theme.
Recounting the traumatic event with Sara over the phone, Amar revealed Jon’s difficult emotional reaction to the incident. How it had, like the tip of an iceberg, foreshadowed a greater struggle; how it froze, expanded, cracked open a deep chasm in their relationship, at its start.
“Yeah, but it’s beautiful,” said Sara, both empathizing with how Jon must have felt and understanding Amar’s perspective.
Sara, in turn, divulged how she’d been plagued for years with nightmares of flying axes. How Ethan’s axe just missed her head … how awful Sara felt it happened when Amar and Jon were engaged to be married.
“I didn’t know …” Amar said, newly sensitized to Sara’s experience, her perspective from the mountain side of waterfall’s ledge.
After partially overhearing the conversation, Jon chimed in. “Yeah, well … I was a co-dependent asshole,” his eyebrows lifted sympathetically referencing his now-sober state.
Amar welcomed this admission, fully soaking for a moment in his candidness and carefully weighing its possibly over-generous capitulation. Then agreed with Sara.
“No,” shaking her head despite herself — eyebrows raised in half bemusement, half hope.
She knew her part in it. Acceptance welled up all around.
“It is, actually, beautiful.”
  Whenever she used the word “beautiful,” Amar was reminded of the great room, the magic carpet, and nature’s promise of fluidity and change. She felt a sudden largesse billowing up inside her, reminding her of time’s purpose.
River’s rambling directionality toward its ocean end.

ξ

Amy Rubin writes poetry and creative nonfiction and is making progress on her first full-length work of fiction. Her essays have been published in The Raffish and Litro Magazine and have been short-listed twice for New Philosopher Magazine’s Writer’s Award. She lives in Indianapolis, has an MA in the history and philosophy of science, sells vintage books and clothes, and teaches yoga for recovery. Moved artistically by her mood and calling herself a New Transcendentalist, she eagerly awaits the Poetic Economy.