Chainsmoking with Pigeons

Sometimes there’s a point in your life where you dip your toe into the river between sanity and insanity. There may even be a point where you choose to immerse yourself in those dangerous rapids. But a few of us, some of us not able to now tell which side we used to live on, get swept along in the current and dragged under, and when we re-surface, the side with the people eating cigarette butts and wasing their hair with jars of peanut butter seems more like home.

I used to be a normal girl, I just liked to hang out under the bridge where the bums spend the long cold Chicago winters. They say if you drop a bucket of water in the midst of winter, it turns to ice before it hits the ground. I don’t know if I believe it though, those bums always seem to make it through the winter with nothing but fingerless gloves and cold canned soup. They might be a different breed of human, a superhuman of sorts that can withstand conditions of all sorts, like the dogs that live on the streets of islands and live off the remnants of fish corpses and the liquid they lick out of broken beer bottles. They may be hungry but they’re very much alive.

I used to smoke packs of Basics under the bridge and dip my toes into the water when it was warm enough. I didn’t have any money to buy food, only cigarettes. So I’d smoke a pack like I’d eat a meal, then I’d go home and change all my clothes in my closet and reemerge fresh and smokeless to eat dinner with my family, which by then I’d already begun to outgrow.

The first time anything ever seemed off was in July, when the shade of the bridge seemed like a refuge, a cool tongue lapping over the pavement again and again, cooling it with saliva that evaporated except for in the sweat beads forming under my hairline, in the curve of my upper lip, and in the crease between my breasts. I still had curves then, I remember leaning over the water and looking at my reflection, the large healthy curve of my cheeks and hips, and I even remember poking the roll of fat where the underwire of my bra pinched the skin with disdain. The small rolls of skin that makes us women we are taught to hate, to starve and mold our bodies until they’re lithe like the smooth muscles of a cat. Gliding without ever taking an unattractive angle. The first thing that happened when I lost touch with the saner side of myself is that I dropped these curves that made me a women, those last pounds that for years I’d been trying to diet and exercise away. Within weeks they were nothing more than the ashes under the bridge from my Basics. I can now take two hands and cup the space between my ribs, where my stomach has become concave. Grasp the bones of hips that are bigger than I remember. Gone is the body I had as a woman, the weight and influence that made me that much more human.

Under the bridge I heard the echoes of a girl’s voice. It was whispering and the only way it was distinctly female is that it had a soft, caressing feel, like lips the have been glossed with lipstick and puckered seductively. It was a low steady whisper, and it chased my thoughts around my head like lyrics to a song I knew but couldn’t remember the name of. I paced back and forth, trying to determine where it was the loudest, where this woman could be trapped, where it was coming from. Finally I bent, gravel digging into my knees, my left ear dipped as close to the water as it could get without submerging half my face in the water. There it was, it was louder. Come into the water, it whispered, let me out. Come into the water, the voice whispered. Then I saw the ripples. The ripples of the water where there shouldn’t be, where the air was the stillest the water seemed to ripple, as if someone from beneath, a mirror image of myself was running her fingers across the water, seeing if she could break the surface from the bottom up. The breath caught in the back of my throat and I stood abruptly, the blood rushing to my head from the change and everything blurred together for a moment before righting itself. I dropped my cigarette to the ground and ran. I ran and ran and somehow ended up on my doorstep. I couldn’t breath, the air too thick, and so I got up the stairs and into the shower and stayed there until the cold water shocked the ability to breath back into my lungs. That night I dreamt about the other me, the one trapped beneath the river’s surface and wondered if she would ever find a way out.