She told her secrets to the river. It’d become a habit. Near dusk, she’d lace up her all-terrain boots, put on her heaviest winter coat, and walk to the water. This time was to be no different. The trek wasn’t long, and within a song or two — playing out into massive headphones she also used as earmuffs — she was following the River Walk and dragging her hand along the railing. It felt frigid to touch. After she passed half a dozen benches and an iron horse statue called Sugar, she pulled her headphones off and listened to the crash of the water against rocks and the seawall. It soothed her.
Growing up, she’d longed to be nearer to the water. Any water. She loved most things about it. Like the vast emptiness of open lakes, the pull of gravity that waves endured, and the miles and miles of dank beaches to stroll along. And also boats, she was at ease upon those, but rarely went swimming. Maritime communities dotted all the shores of the five Great Lakes, and she’d spent one summer at age 20 as a newspaper intern near the Pennsylvanian Lake Erie shore in a city named for the water. There, she’d escape on hot afternoons to the public beaches, walk a few inches into the water and stand in one place — the waves dragging the sand back and forth around her feet until they disappeared beneath the sediment. As it slowly buried her, some days she’d watch the sun vanish from sight into steep, narrow piles of rocks. Each time she went there was like a baptism.
Those memories were a large reason she’d come to live in this new place. She was a few miles too far from Lake Huron to walk there, but she’d found the fickle current of the St. Clair River sufficed. The sun was sinking fast now, sending a bright pink and orange stripe across the water’s blue sheen. She understood why the area was known for that color of the water, but she noticed as she stopped at the edge of a public fishing dock and peered straight down, it was nearly black. Muck, rocks, and vegetation covered the river floor beneath an unknown depth below. This is where she’d speak to it today.
I don’t know what I’m doing here, she told it. I haven’t felt at home anywhere in years, and the longer I live here, the more I wonder if it’ll ever feel like home. I won’t hold my breath.
And yet she did — for just a moment — and then, she sighed a long, hot exhale. For a while, she let her body adjust to the cold until it felt like it encapsulated her blood and flowed forcefully through her veins. Her heart’s rhythm didn’t change, slow or quicken, but it thumped harder in her chest just the same. She thought it may be freezing over, flicking on a switch inside to turn her innards to ice. This soothed her too. She liked the cold, and she liked the water.
Nautical ghosts peppered the Port Huron shore, from the old, half-detached railroad tracks wedged in the riverbed south of downtown to the thick beaches at the mouth of Lake Huron. Along the River Walk, there were tall, wooden beams bounded together by rope and protruding from the water where great docks used to live. Many of them leaned like historic towers — pillars too weak to endure the ages. There were also large, abandoned iron shafts hanging where titans of industry once unloaded commerce unto town. They seemed to be left purposefully, homage to a lost world. Yet, these remnants juxtaposed the teaming stacks of manufacturing across the river in Canada, where clouds of steam rose from tall factories and lights glittered as night fell.
Maybe, I can make it home. Maybe, just maybe, I can belong here. I’m this alone everywhere I go. That doesn’t mean I have to be lonely.
Her affirmations were starting to take hold, and she’d all but convinced herself that here, along the waters of Michigan’s thumb, she could find a latch in the ladder of community culture. They were family-driven, and they clung to their summertime recreation and tourism. But she could be one of them. She had to be. Now, she wondered what people thought of her passing by the water. Couples walking arm in arm and talking about the landscape. People walking dogs — poop bags on hand. Amateur photographers veering off the sidewalk, stumbling on rocks to get the perfect sunset. They seemed accessories to scenery to her. But what was she to them? She was someone, they were someone, but perhaps, really nothing to the world.
I can be someone here. I can be important. I won’t go unnoticed. I won’t be this lonely person with no dog, or man, or purpose to accompany me. Not this … sad girl.
She had been feeling like a blemish on the face of the city for some time. She breathed its air and took up space, but anyone could breathe that air or take up that space. She was river fodder, far from her old home and drowning in her new one. And then, the sad girl watched her tears fall to the water under her, where the impact was too light to ripple. As she parted her lips to speak more truths of her hurt, she reminded herself that her words would also fall — the river keeping them secrets forever.
Walking back down the pier and on to the River Walk, her thoughts turned to the place she used to live, that old home. In reality, she was following the pavement as it curved along the St. Clair shore, below high-set backyards of historic houses, through a marsh, and into a tunnel beneath Military Street. These things, however, she hardly noticed. She only saw her lost Illinoisan town before her now. She remembered the square and could see its stocky brick buildings and fading courthouse taking shape before her. She remembered the warm winds that came in each spring, the superfluous but enlightening banter of townsfolk, and how the loud whistling of passing trains would wake her from sleep each night. Only the booming of foghorns from wayward freighters woke her in Port Huron. She missed the trains. She missed the overwhelming flatness of the heartlands and long miles of highway that cut through cornfields between towns.
The cars were loud rushing over the River Walk tunnel. She couldn’t move herself all the way beneath the road. Half the tunnel’s lights were out, and its darkness seemed unsafe. This is enough for today, she thought. My ass is frozen stiff. How do I get the hell out of here, though? The area 15 feet up was fenced off from the public sidewalk along the road, but she spotted a gap in fencing at the corner of a nearby yard. She dug her gloved hands into the grass, and began to pull herself up. The hill was steep and still partly covered in snow. She slipped twice, darkening her leggings with dirt, before reaching street level.
Nearly a mile out, she saw downtown, desolate for a Sunday, and knew her apartment would come about a quarter-mile sooner. Though it’d gotten dark, she passed people taking down their Christmas lights, and a few others with grocery bags, a cigarette, or a dog leash in hand. She feigned a smile for them, and spoke, “Hello,” to more than one. There were more people here than her old home in Illinois. It was a much bigger city with even more people in other bigger towns nearby. The face she put on to hide from them all was exhausting.
She took a sharp left into her neighborhood after a time. It was an old area and could be rough at night. When she started working there, people recommended that she not live south of the Black River if she indeed decided to live in town at all. But the rent for her one-bedroom place oddly cut out of a decades-old purple house on Historic Court Street was two hundred dollars cheaper than most apartment complexes. Hers sat on the second level and she shared a front entrance with a neighbor downstairs. At just the moment she walked up the house’s porch, that neighbor emerged suddenly from within their dark-paneled stairwell. It made her jump.
“Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” the neighbor muttered, smirking slightly. His shaggy hair poked out from beneath a patterned handkerchief wrapped around his head, and his face was covered in a light stubble. His eyes were dark and seemed kind to her, but his gruffness reminded her of something else.
“No, no,” she managed to reply. “I’m just jumpy.” He looks like David Foster Wallace wearing that bandana.
From the corner of her eye, she watched him stagger to the curb clutching a white trash bag, while she pretended to check her mailbox. Before he turned back around, she’d started for the door. Climbing the stairs inside, she could hear the front door clank, as it was pushed open and closed shut. She held her keys a moment in silence and waited for him to disappear into his own apartment. And with a swift turn of a key, she did the same.
The sad girl’s nights in her place were anxiously spent experimenting. She’d show up to work the next day with dark acrylic paint wedged beneath her nails and left in the creases of her knuckles and palms. Or she’d be half asleep from the late hours she’d spent working up a cramp in her hand from writing. But her paintings and poems weren’t ever worth keeping, and her efforts were rarely fulfilling. Tonight, she’d decided against trying anything, and after a shower, she lay in bed — her wet hair dampening her pillowcase. Below her floor, she could hear her gruff neighbor talking. His voice was cavernous and even-tempered. She’d lived in the house for nearly three months and she’d now only met him twice. What he must think of me, she thought. If he thinks of me, that is.
She never heard the words he was saying, but she’d come to know the sound of his voice so well. It was almost as if she’d memorized its slow, deep cadence in a manner you might memorize the rhythm of a man’s heartbeat as it pounded through his chest. He must have been on the phone because she never heard another voice. As his conversation continued, she let the sound of his talking lull her to sleep.
The girl would go on to dream that night. She’d dream about the fall harvest, and a full moon glistening off pale rows of rustling dried corn stalks. She’d dream of riding in a beat-up Jeep — the open air spanking her face as it picked up speed down dark, country roads. She’d dream of reaching for the Jeep’s stick shift to feel its shutter before another, much larger warm and calloused hand came down to meet hers. She’d dream of a fleeting happiness, and then from somewhere in a distant mist, a foghorn would blare to wake her. Fuck.
Pent-Up Aching Rivers 