The Boy in the Back of my Canoe

Nothing and Nostalgia

The water was calm but I was not. On the outside, I appeared happy, content to be gliding along with someone staring at the back of my head. On the inside, I wanted nothing more than to slam the shaft of my paddle into my head repeatedly until my blood filled up the entire lake and matched the crimson canoe and splotchy strawberry sunburns that graced our arms. My bloodshot eyes probably matched that hue as well. Red wasn't a favorite color of mine, but it was inescapable where I was going.

And where exactly was I going? In circles in my head and in real life. Keep paddling right and you keep going left. Round and round in circles through the red, red lake.

I had been there so many times before in that same spot most likely thinking the same thoughts. But they were different thoughts still because my thoughts now were of times before, and each year I would have a year of more experiences. Along with the repeated experience came the hopeless nostalgia.

People label nostalgia as a happy thought, but experiencing the "happiness" of nostalgia as an unhappy person isn't the same. Everything you long for, everything you once had, is out of reach and has become nothing to you but the dreams of someone you used to be. The happy moments of splashing and rocking the boat were blissful as a child, but now the water from the memory felt scolding hot to the touch.

When you try to reach into the past, you always get burned.

The scars on my hands were nothing but blisters in reality, but it's like I could touch them and feel the memory of that exact moment years ago.

Continue paddling. Never stop.

His eyes drilled holes into the back of my head. I couldn't see him, but I just knew. This had happened before, many times before, but not like this. Most people look forward at the bulging lifejackets and tumbling tendrils of hair simply because they are concentrating and have nowhere else to look. This boy was instead concentrating on exactly what he was looking at--my head. Disregard the task at hand; he was prying at the hairs on my head, pulling them out one by one to dissect the contents of my brain.

The yellow paddle's blade sunk beneath the surface of the lake and pushed water behind me creating miniature whirlpools that erupted around it. He was paddling opposite me now so the circle no longer existed.

I whipped around and told him not so politely to quit staring at my head like it was something he could analyze or solve with enough focus.

Slightly dazed and still zoned out on the area of my face, he more politely replied that he was just trying to remember something.

What did he want to remember that involved my head? I asked him that peculiar question.

He said something about knowing me.

I told him he couldn't possibly know me because we had never met.

He stated that he knew very well that we had never met.

I waited for something of an explanation, a breeze to clear the fog in front of my eyes. When he left me staring into the grayish cloud, I turned back to the clear water and paddled on my left. He, in turn, paddled right.

Without turning around, I asked him what he was trying to remember.

He launched into a summary of his current thoughts. He spoke of his strange attraction to me, not in any way other than wanting to understand who I was. His reasoning behind this was that he felt like he already knew me.

I regarded him as nothing to me and said as much.

We stopped paddling almost simultaneously without planning it. He told me to turn around. I did. I asked him why.