We See the Herons at Red Bud Isle
Isa Arsén
Putting the kayak together on a makeshift dock, we decide to give it more ballast this time.
The glass-water is easier to paddle this morning than any other outing before—easier too for me to twist over my shoulder and speak to you, my voice otherwise lost to the wind ahead of me if I don’t.
I asked you twice when we first got the boat if you’re sure I belong in the front seat, where consistency matters more than power. And after all, this is new to both of us. You believe me more than I tend to believe myself, as always. I take the front seat.
It’s grey but not cold, quiet but not empty. We feel free enough to explore here in the shallows, where there aren’t skeins of litter stuck to the lakeside and I don’t get distracted by the churn of traffic thundering on the bridges arcing above us while I struggle to focus on my one-two, one-two. I want to make you proud of me.
And you are proud of me here, and always, whether or not my insides let me know it. It’s a marathon to break that habit. I’ve worked at undoing it like a too-tight knot with thought after thought after mindful bleeding thought—which my sister calls her ladle-well and my therapist calls finding the truth, but I can’t seem to keep the crux of it in my hands for longer than a moment; the slipping of some white-bellied and wet-scaled fish, I sense it laughs at me before leaping from my fists back into its lake. I seem always to leap in after it, catch it in my teeth, and somehow claw my way back up the shores of suspiring for acceptance.
I never learned how to take up space. I grew so quickly past simply foal-legged that I didn’t know my own body for years, still don’t. I know I belong in her, but most times she feels less like the boat we build and buoy each Saturday, and far more like the vessel I rented from the gangly summer-job teenager in Bastrop who gave us the good paddles. There is more to me now—in flesh-bone as well as heart-weight, both in the meat of me and the heft of the things I’ve grown to love—with which I must make peace if I’m to be a habitable place for the people who need me.
I’ve begun daydreaming recently about myself as something larger, someone who does not apologize for herself and cherishes every step she takes. I am, slowly, becoming.
You tell me I look stronger, here, in these calmer waters. I say perhaps it’s the extra ballast. I know it’s something greater.
A siege of herons meets us when we cut left and emerge from behind the pylon before the dam. Fishing their breakfast to the left and nesting in the scar of the treeline to the right, they burst into the air at the soft slapping of our oars. They fly ahead of us to find peace in the waters through which we haven’t yet paddled and seem surprised when we cross them again as we go—You featherless creatures piloting that pale husk, what strangeness you bring with you!
They call to one another as they pass overhead, their s-bent necks erupting with scratchy scraw-ing and their wingspans twice as wide as they are long. The adolescent that bursts from the water not three feet from us is wet from diving, legs dangling, crowing loud ahead of him as though to split the sky.
I wish, as we pass our in-point to port and start around once more, I had such presence in my own un-adulthood.
Our second lap. From beneath the bridge again, the herons take wing. I take up space.
Isa Arsén is a writer, climber, and too-many-feelings-haver based in Austin, TX. Her work on love, loss, and the fine threads that bind them has been featured in several short fiction journals and anthologies. You can find her waxing romantic about everything under the sun on Twitter @arsen_i or at www.inarsen.com.
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