A CRUCIAL ERROR

Drowning is silent, Whistle, a rash of new billboards around the city warns us. Along the way we learned the wrong lesson or we learned the lesson wrong. We believe in splashing and thrashing, something awful but at least kind of grand in its demand for our attention. A drowning person will pull you under, we’ve long been horrified to know and I’m not sure that’s still true, but alone out there or silently in our midst it’s a quiet barely bobbing of the head, a sinking and a fruitless not quite lifting of the face we must fear. So much right now seems metaphorical but they mean this literally. At the creek today wading away from the happy dogs in neon canine flotation devices paddling after neon balls, in a thicket of murk a few feet from my feet I saw a red life jacket pinned between current and rock and I was too scared to say anything or to reach out. It had been there for a long time, or at least long enough. There was no thrashing, no bobbing. No one was missing from the festive shore, no one was looking for anyone, at least not anymore. A friend I grew up with, Whistle, was broken not by watching the truck wreck her sister but by the house she lived in ever after lined with pictures her parents blew up and framed and framed. There is a man who after many years of practice has found a way to cut a perfect hole in a perfect ceiling to give us back the sky in ways we didn’t realize we’d lost or maybe never knew. For a million dollars he will install one for you and through many meticulous calculations frame a god’s eye or a god’s-eye view, a kind of empty nest from which you turn your gaze skyward to a floating egg, maybe gray, maybe blue, or almost any color at all if you watch during the sunset light sequence he installs to show you exactly how much to believe your own eyes. Maybe if everything is relative, Whistle, then everything in its moment is absolute.