Special

When Taylor had one of her first seizures--just before my Parents' divorce by a few years, I think--I wouldn't leave them alone. Was she all right yet? Was it gone? Could I eat something, because I hadn't had breakfast yet, and it was the most important meal of the day? Did she respond when I said this? What about this?

They kept shooing me away, and eventually they scorned me so heavily I just went into my room and sat on my bed, staring out the window.

I'll always remember that room. I'd gotten my own fairly recently, the walls were a washed and pale blue. My bed was against the left wall, my closet was on the right. There was a huge window. I could see the lagoon I ice-skated, fished and swam in; the lagoon whose smell I miss more than anything.

Once you've lived somewhere near water, you pick up the smell, but not just that. The feeling, too, of knowing your soul is sitting in it.

When you live near the water, your soul is always swimming.

It had flooded recently; pools were in-between the lagoon's edge (loaded with city-bought boulders I used to skip and do cartwheels on) and the edge of trees and bark that was our garden.

It didn't look like a garden.

It just looked dead.

It was that almost-dead time between summer and fall, where summer's trying to hold on, but fall's peeking through, like holes through nice wallpaper. Like clean air through cigarette smoke.

The lagoon, which I'll always love and always remember the almost-blue brown color--and the smell. I'll always remember that smell, like wild and magic and moving and dancing and singing and ugly. Ugly was at the edge, like frost on a leaf you forgot to rake, and I inhaled it.

I knew it. I breathed it.

I miss it. I'll always miss it.

Anyway, the window, which so fascinated me, and probably would today (seeing does that constantly), wasn't any good. 

So I picked up a book.

At the time, I rather hated books. Books were awful. Books were a prison to force things I didn't want to think about into my head. I'd much rather think up adventures where I was sailing on the oceans I'd never seen with a sword in my hand, or dancing in a ballroom with princes, or laughing as I danced in those city-planted tree groves that lined the lagoon, whispering to my fairies, talking to the ghosts on the island I couldn't get the courage to swim out to, plotting Gabi's escape from her parents, who obviously could never *really* understand her, catching frogs, rescuing baby turtles, dried in the sun, from the side of the road and throwing them back to water; watching them come back to life when the water hit them.

Water can give life--yes, I'll always remember that.

I was wild then. I miss that.

So I picked up a book. I hated books. Books were awful.

I can't remember exactly what I was--something about Santa Paws, Come home--and the cover had a dog with a wreath around his neck and a Santa hat. I touched it. It smelled like book fair. The front cover was a little rumpled on the bottom right corner.

I read it. I'd read before, but never really focused on it. Like I opened my eyes to the world, I opened my heart to the book. I didn't just fear for Santa Paws, who I knew and understood wasn't real, I wanted to save him myself. I wanted that boy to have his dog. I wanted the concert to go well.

I looked up. It felt like hours had passed; my little chest was huffed with the pride and effort of the thing.

"Payton?" Mom came in and sat on my bed. "She's okay."

I never forgot that book, and I'd went on an adventure despite the Cold. Oh, that stupid Cold. When you're a particularly wild child who climbs trees, understands adult jokes, who runs as far as she can just to feel the air on her face; that child, yes, for that child, Cold kills everything.

I'd defeated it.

That was how I found books. I haven't set them down since. Words have power. Words can help us escape. I've forgotten that for a time, I've taken that for granted.

So, my friends, excuse me.

I have a world to find.


Perhaps someday, I'll even find a book that smells like a Lagoon, or shines like the moon in my heart, or makes me happy as Katie does.



Anything's possible when I am wild....



and it's certainly, absolutely and utterly, truer than the flag of England, time I was.