What if I was always meant to be a fish?

Fish do not stare at their wrinkles or silvering hair. They bear no puncture wounds of worry from what their body looks like (or doesn’t). They do not find fault in the rolls forming mountains around their midline. They swim in the sea. They blow bubbles to breathe.

Every time I find an old photograph I turn it over to see if there is handwriting on it. Blow dust off the memory. I try to summon the way it felt to stand amongst the slender birch and sheaths of pine at my aunt’s cabin on the lake. Barefoot with sap stuck between my toes. The way it felt to paddle the spider-webbed canoe to the swamp to pick swollen lily-pad blooms from their slumber. Pulling on the long limbs that connected them to their home, so we could take them back to ours. We would leave them to float in a blue plastic bucket. Then scale the moss-cloaked boulder. Play hide-and-seek behind the trees too slim to hide much of anything. We did all of this, as the blooms slowly stopped living.

My mother used to dress us in matching polyester halter tops and shorts in the summer. I was sick then. Spent hours lying face down on a brown vinyl lounger. Mom pounding my back with a percussor wrapped in canvas. Trying to encourage the slime to leave, not lodge in the little pockets in my lungs. Afterwards I would sit quiet on a chair. Vinyl mask over nose and mouth. Strings pulled taut for the tightest seal. As the large steel compressor gurgled and warm medicine swam into my lungs.

We travelled to Florida after I got out of the hospital. I remember my crayon-filled red vinyl purse melting from the scorching Florida heat in the back window of the big blue Impala. I remember the ants marching through the RV screen to eat my sugar sticks before I could lick them clean. I remember the invisible voice of Disney telling us we were coming up on Tumbleweed Turn. I do not remember my lungs collapsing. I do not remember the warm beige curtain of alarm. Nor the sterility of fear.

During COVID I was frozen from the fright of getting sick. I convinced myself the gills of that fledgling child shivered inside my grown-up rib cage. Still shatterable. I made a believer out of myself that my body was not strong enough to handle come what may. That child all those years ago did not shrink from such things. She did not use her muddy lungs as a shield towards living fully. She just paddled to the pond, and watched for the bubbles before she chose her next delight.