I step onto the deck while the sky is still iron and the boards press cool against my arches. The storm left a rinsed world: ozone in the air, a wet-metal tang on my tongue, cedar lifting from the siding where the rain woke it. My robe brushes my calves; the belt taps a rhythm against my shin. The lake is five slow breaths away and higher—two inches, I measure by the pale rings on the rocks, the clean line where yesterday’s edge ended and today begins.
“Two inches,” I whisper. “Enough to hold me better.”
I carry the towel because ritual matters, not because I’ll need it. I unlatch the gate; the latch’s tiny rook silhouette catches first light and releases it. The rook shows up everywhere in this town, a mascot pretending to be architecture. I don’t scold it this morning. I pass it without touching.
The water meets my ankles like an honest handshake. I walk until the chill climbs my thighs and belly, until the whisper of my robe stops and the lake starts reading my skin for intent. I inhale, plant my feet in the silt, then push off.
“One,” I say, floating on my back.
My ears dip and the world filters down to bass—the thud of my heart, the steady fizz of rain still slipping off leaves, the far pump in one neighbor’s sump. Clouds hold their color like a bruise that’s healing; the houses along the shore keep their glass shut for once. I smell wet stone and last night’s lightning.
“Two,” I say.
The lake folds around the small curve of my belly and says nothing about it. I let the water carry the news to where it belongs, not to feeds but to muscles, bones, this slow machine of repair I rent from my mother’s body. I keep my hands wide, palms open, a cross-shaped trust.
“Three.”
I count to keep the noise out: no docket numbers, no board minutes, no listserv alerts about unauthorized strollers. The HOA thread will wake soon and congratulate itself for “child-neutral landscaping” that survived the storm. I am not logging in. I am logging air.
“Four.”
A ribbon of goose chatter rakes the far side of the bay, then dissolves. I watch the underside of the morning from my back. The sky is pewter with a slit of tender color rising behind the boat slips. A drop gathers on my lobe and rolls into my ear, turning sound into velvet. My toes surface, five white commas, then sink.
“Five,” I say, and then: “You’re safe,” to my belly.
I don’t make promises about tomorrow. I offer today’s water and this measured breath. The lake presses my spine flatter and reads me into its paragraph. I reach the count of ten and start again, because I only trust small loops right now.
“One,” I say. “Two. Three.”
Somewhere, inside one of the donor salons down the shoreline, a caterer will inventory crystal and prepare captions for a toast that praises legacy without heirs. There will be live subtitles that turn champagne into policy. I imagine the captioner typing purpose with quick fingers and not thinking about bodies. Then I erase that room from my head and watch a dragonfly’s rehearsal over my face.
“Four,” I say. “Five.”
The lake has a speed limit I cannot hack. It refuses to download my urgency. It doesn’t ping, it doesn’t push, it doesn’t request two-factor. It offers buoyancy, full stop.
“Six.”
The count loosens into breath when a small wave from the dam’s morning release arrives, new energy from upriver pulled through a gate by someone I will never meet. The wave lifts me, sets me, tells me the system upstream made a choice. I let that be true without resenting it. I am making my own choices at a different scale: fences on a router, pencil marks on a calendar, the quiet closing of a drawer.
“Seven,” I say, and the word leaves a bubble on my lip.
I tilt my chin and sip the horizon. A heron stands in the reeds, taller than it should be on that thin legged geometry, stone-still. Its beak points at an idea beyond me. The wind has not yet hired the day.
“Eight.”
When the water warms a degree against my shoulders, I open my eyes wider and let tears mix without ceremony. They have taste but no speech. I count to ten and forgive myself for needing numbers.
“Again,” I tell myself. “Start clean.”
My hands scull, slow ovals that push the lake into gentle reasons. A mosquito tests my knuckle; I flick it away without anger. I watch my breath make small fog ghosts when my nose breaks the cool air. My belly rides high, a skiff with a precious cargo that does not require a manifest.
“You and me,” I say. “And this.”
Micro-hook: Across the water, a light flicks on in a glass cube house; in my head a comment bubble pops, then dissolves before it forms a sentence.
I turn my face toward the heron without moving the rest of me. My ears submerge again; the drum of my pulse replaces the thin electricity of the waking neighborhood. The bird’s neck draws a question mark and then lengthens to an answer. It is not a metaphor; it is simply ready.
“Stay,” I say to the moment. “Just a breath longer.”
The heron lifts.
The world hushes to make room for the wing sound: a sheet of heavy silk drawn across a table. Every muscle in me registers the authority of that takeoff. Drops bead along its ankles and fall like tiny coins into the water. I stop counting. I surrender the numbers to the bird’s slow arithmetic.
“Go well,” I say.
The bird sails low over my chest and becomes a new line farther down the bay. My ribs expand to accept a hush I didn’t know I could carry. Even the sump pump pauses, or maybe I forget to hear it.
“Thank you,” I tell the silence.
I let my legs drift apart and my hands fall open wider. The water slides into my palms with a temperature that feels like permission. I do not perform it for anyone. No one is here with a lens or a clipboard. The rook on the deck latch is too far away to supervise.
“This is mine,” I say.
I roll once to wet my face completely and push my hair back, then roll onto my back again, slower than the worry that used to chase me. The sky brightens to a difficult pink. A stray breeze presses a chill against the peaks of my shoulders and I answer with a kick that traces a small star in the water. The star softens and disappears without needing a screenshot.
“I won’t post you,” I tell the lake. “I won’t make you a lesson.”
I carry the hush to shore with a lazy backstroke. Gravel taps my ankles in mild scolds that feel like applause. I stand, and the water releases me with reluctance that warms my shins. The robe is where I left it on the rock, heavy with the damp that sneaked into it while I swam. I wring the belt and watch an arc of droplets write brief punctuation on the sand.
“Home,” I say, not to the house but to my own heat returning.
A window opens down the shoreline and a human voice coughs, then says something I can’t hear. The HOA listserv will flare with new rules about algae or kayak storage; the donors will send their morning bullet points about “narrative opportunities.” I have locked my boundaries. I have marked my calendar in pencil. I have set fences for machines. I have names I will not say today.
“I’ll be quiet,” I promise. “I’ll be patient.”
I rub my belly with both palms and stand where the new waterline kisses my toes. The two-inch rise turned last week’s ugly smell into a clean breath, silt tucked back under its blanket. I crouch and press my fingers into the wet grit, then wipe them on my robe, leaving a pair of earthy commas that punctuate the cotton with testimony only I will read.
“We’re okay,” I tell the small life. “We’re not content; we’re okay.”
Micro-hook: My phone buzzes once in the house—one long, hungry note—and stops. I do not move toward it.
I walk the strip of beach behind the houses, counting cracked mussel shells and forgetting the count on purpose. The glass facades wear rain freckles like freckles that belong to them; the closets inside are exhaling cedar again in the warm-up. On one door, a rook-shaped doorknob winks at me with chrome smugness. I wink back.
“You don’t own mornings,” I say.
I pause where the rocks step down into deeper water and look out across the path the heron took. The air is a cleaner blue now, thin ribbons of gold tearing at the edges. I lift my chin and fill my lungs to the top, then to the top again, the second sip I often forget to take. My shoulders widen in the world I just earned.
“In and out,” I tell myself. “No press release required.”
I climb the short stairs to the deck and towel my hair with small, grateful violence. The towel smells like sun from earlier in the week and like the detergent I chose for not having an opinion. I leave damp footprints that look like quotation marks. If I said anything quotable out there, it was to the water only.
In the kitchen, condensation feathers the window. I put the kettle on. Steam ghosts the glass and writes a brief private language that disappears between breaths. I speak to the water again because I’m not done learning new prayers.
“Hold us,” I say. “Hold steady.”
The house answers in hums I have renamed: FENCE-ONE patrolling; PORCH fenced; STAGE gagged and arguing with itself in a quarantined corner. The router’s lights blink like an even pulse. The drawer down the hall keeps its line. I do not visit it. I do not need the room to prove it remains there.
“Later,” I tell that line. “I’ll know when later arrives.”
Tea turns the air to earth and citrus. I carry the mug to the deck and sit on the top step with my knees up, robe tucked under my thighs. The lake wears its extra two inches with poise, a slight alteration that corrects nothing and offers everything. A spider rebuilds a thread between the railings; its patience embarrasses me into gentler breathing.
I put my palm on my belly and wait for nothing. Waiting without expectation is new. I let the mug warm my knuckles. A squirrel scolds the world for waking it; a car door thunks two houses down; the flag at the end of the street luffs into duty. I finish the tea and rinse the cup with rain pooled in a bowl on the stairs.
“No audience,” I tell my face. “Smile anyway.”
I do. No camera captures it. The smile feels earned and private, the kind that builds bone instead of headlines. It lives in my cheeks until it drops into my chest and becomes heat.
I stand and the robe’s hem taps my ankles like applause again. The lake gives back a new glitter where the first hard light lands, small coins tossed into a fountain I refuse to wish into bureaucracy. I lift my hand to the water and draw an invisible line from here to the heron’s reeds, a string that will hold through noon without anyone else tugging it.
“Keep,” I tell the morning. “Just keep.”
I step inside and let the door whisper shut. The rook on the latch reflects a final sliver of dawn off its crown, then dulls in the room’s ordinary light. In the quiet that follows, I hear the faintest, kindest sound—my breath counting without numbers.
Unresolved: When the day brightens and the town returns to performance, will I protect this private rise, inch by inch—or will the noise find a crack and pull me back under for applause I do not want?