I found myself drowning in this river. I found myself sinking. I found myself in this river, floating on my back, watching the clouds and deciphering in them odd shapes and the faces of people I knew. People I loved. I saw my mother and my father, brothers and sisters. Their familiar faces. I found myself deep in this river, conscious of all that fell around me.

I found myself in my bedroom. Kneeling on the floor next to my bed. My jewelry box on the floor in front of me. My jewelry box where I was stowing money to buy a knitting kit found in a magazine. It included yarn, needles, and a pattern to make a winter hat. I had a plan to make that hat. To knot it together with my own two hands for my mother. I thought of my mother. I wrote a note and put it in the jewelry box, so that should anything happen, my mother would know that she should keep the money and save until she could buy the sewing kit herself. And knit her own hat. I wrote a note to my mother regarding the possibility of my death and put it in my jewelry box that I hid under my bed.

I am about to jump into the river. Rip off my sweatshirt and dive in. Arms extended overhead. Dive like all the girls on TV, in the Olympics. I am going to put my head under water. I found myself in this river. I found myself sinking. I found myself floating on my back and the sky blue with only patches of clouds that formed shapes that I recognized as family.

I remember the back of the school bus spelling out this river. Who could spell it the fastest? Who could spit the letters out without stumbling or breaking the rhythm of the word? Over and over, we repeated those letters. The same four letters, a high-pitched machine gun spitting off letters, competing for the fastest, most accurate repetition. I remember never associating the word with this river. It was a word before it was a name before it was given to the river. I remember standing at the back of the bus and shouting the configuration of repeated letters and riptide sounds to create the name of this river.

I found myself deep in this river, forgetting it was a river and knowing it only as water and then knowing it only as cold and then knowing it only as dark and then knowing only the letters that spell out the name of this river. Knowing that before I was born there was this river and there was this sand, and clouds made shapes and there was this sun. This same sun that danced at the top of the water and found its way to me and my arms and legs and hair and all. I knew that the sun was the sun before I was born and that the sun had a name before I had arms, legs, and hair and all that. I found myself floating on this river, skin and sun and leaves letting go and wind too cold for swimming.

I remember Sunday School. A church basement. And narrow windows that let in the slightest morning light. I remember being told that I had a name before this name. I had a soul before a body. I was told that there was a Supreme Being who knew my name, and my face, my skin, hair, freckles, and moles before I was born. I was loved before I spoke. I was forgiven before I was wrong. I remember repeating, along with this group of children just like me, words written, carved, etched and memorized. I remember these words. Words that I repeated, repeated into memory. I remember that church basement. I remember light through slotted windows only broken when clouds passed by. I remember being told that after I died I would be able to rise and that all the wrong I had ever done would be forgiven. I imagined myself someday an angel. My wings dark and dripping with rainwater and pondweed from all the swimming and sinking I had done all my life.


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Mary Hamilton is the author of WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE, a collection of shorts.

Read her postcard.

Read more of her work in the archive.

Detail of collage on main page courtesy of Ubé.





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