Let's stay on the dock all day, in the dry sun by the water. With relief and iced drinks, on the brink of falling into a hypnotic trance, pretending to exist in some kind of vivid dream, and it seems I've never felt so at peace in the past fourteen years. Is it real or just pure dissociation? In this day and age, it's just a hallucination. But floating in the water, I feel fine. Seduced in tidal waves and tranquil from the irony of the nothingness. Why do we leave paradise? Why do we abandon the glue that holds together the broken pieces?
I can't go back to the wet concrete, screaming at the walls in a decaying city that will never replace heaven. Seven times a year we flee the desolation, going far away from the dirty trees, and my newfound home is far from perfect, with a surrounding of life lost. But it's real, uncovered, and I can see it with 20/20 vision. With beer and guitars, shooting stars made for prayers, wishing like a god damn fool. There are no rules to false reality. We suspend our disbelief and unwind inside the pipe dream. Can we never return to the rot and the atrophy? To that town that embodies the symbol of raw, bloody reality? While we lay on the dock and embrace perfection, is it so much worse for our longevity? Is it unhealthy?
I'm indecisive and unpredictable. We scheme for thrill and scream in the water, fear and pleasure fuse together. Clear and boundless, I refuse to accept the truth of our situation. Laying by the flames in a drunken stupor, without a single thought of our tired old home. At this lake, I find myself present and somehow lucid in the moment. I listen to the unknown animals who tip toe through the trees, watching the spiders twirl their webs wherever they please. The beauty comes with risk. And in the day, we drink what we have in the coolers and cabinets. Bad habits are irrelevant in a town like this. Your faults will never be victim to prejudice, with the tucked away trailer parks of men fueled by the catalyst of amphetamines.
All of a sudden, the beasts of hell come in and threaten to crack down on our holy reservoir, draining every drop as they watch waves of water break down the wall and storm the valley below. The dam fills and the water dissolves. What are we expected to do when this utopian life is sucked out of our hands, our clothes, and the curls of our hair? It's cruel and unfair to commit us to a life of serenity and then tease us with the beauty when it disappears. Now all we can do is lay on the still water, give to the sky our desperate attempts at happiness, and pray to stay in this infinite, transcendent world. Hurl ourselves over the spikes in the road and crack the code to contentment. Release ourselves into this ultimatum of an unreliable security, with no real answer to the false promise of continuance. We sit on the dock and try to rest, coming together whenever time gives us a break, for heaven's sake. Soon it will be time to leave and return back to the cycling episodes of instability and fits of indignation. To the downpour of rain and the danger of distress. To all of the broken necessities, the relationships awaiting our return from paradise.
In all honesty, concluding the details of our temporary joy, it's a truly unhinged love-hate relationship. Between a diamond in the rough and a beautiful shipwreck. The white lines or the cold beer? The rage or the thrill? The choice is situational. We do what we can to keep going. Clenching our jaws, grinding our teeth, breaking the law, and flattening under pressure. We grab any opportunity to blow a kiss goodbye to the rainstorm. And on the car ride home from the reservoir, we consider leaving it all behind and starting fresh in a new dream. Leave the scene and come alive again. We'll work it out in the end. We'll train the destination to be our new beginning. I'll fall asleep at night in a vision dream, at that lake in early June, when the water nearly consumed the whole dock. When we would lay under the flock of birds while the heat shifted colors on our skin, and I truly believed I'd be there for eternity.
No matter where I end up, I will make this feeling last. I will make it last until the moon falls and the oceans rise and the sun explodes into billions of blazing stars. Until cars slide off the interstate and cities turn to dust. Even in a barren landscape, I won't lose this feeling. When the ground below me cracks and the mountains crumble, I'll call to my past lovers, my brothers and sisters, and the long lost hustlers. If I wake up from my dream, seeing into the future, I'll always know that if it's too much, and the colors and phantom feelings consume my entire being, I can take myself back. I can live again. I can lay in that flawed paradise and drift into the sky. Even when life has been picked up in a tornado and complicated everything that used to be simple, I will always believe in Oakridge as the sanctuary, the temple, the healing waters of a holy reservoir. It is the place where the line between dreams and reality is blurred, where misery burns and disappears. We couldn't have lived without it if we were always stuck in the city of rain and heartache. The city where reality is the centerfold, and dreams are a luxury.
So I will always pray on the water. I will pray on the trailer parks and the simplicity. I will pray on the brief moments of immortality, with the only people I have ever needed. I will live vicariously through the hidden body of water, slowly disappearing yet everlasting, no matter how unfavorable life can be. No matter the degree of physical separation that leaves me compartmentalizing memory, pushing the visual, audible and tactile sensations of Oakridge into the cerebral vault. No matter how frantic I become from the psychosomatic relationship between my mind and the subsiding water levels, losing a pinch of sanity with every inch that drops, as I feel unnerved to a religious extent when I consider the chain reaction that may follow the moment in time when the levels go shallow.
Regardless of the nauseating nostalgia or the preternatural hysteria, nothing can take me away from the water. Nothing can ever replace those waves, formed from the northwest winds of pain. No words will ever be able to explain the illusion and the daydream of Hills Creek Reservoir. I will never be able to comprehend the emotion that builds and destroys. None of us can let the lake go absent. The lake in a town that weighs down on my mind, where visceral devotion stands tall on the shore, hand in hand with grief. This town tells the tale of a bitter end to a story that writes itself.
Hidden in the Douglas firs and the hemlocks, deep in the mountains of the pacific northwest, the water sits still in a small town on the brink of a collapse.
