crooked, circuitous, just as true

Hot springs. A small wading pool with a fat, steady, piping hot gush of water on a cliff overlooking a half-moon beach not far from the volcano. 

I’m naked, bathing in it, boiling myself like I’m trying melt my frozen core. 

The breeze on my back is cool, soothing, reassuring me I could stay here all day.

I’m here and listening. I want to find out how I can un-tell myself anything, or listen to the quieter voices. The ones that never speak. Not the fight-or-flight ones that talk all the time, telling me whatever they need to for my self-preservation, when maybe I’m supposed to get eaten by the lion so his family lives long enough so that other people can feast. 

I rest my hands on the lip of the pool, and my chin on my hands, watching the lazy waves below. I ask for someone to show up. 

No one comes. I stretch it out. I could stay here all day, soaking up this heat. I feel guilty hogging the lava rock spigot, but there’s no one else to share it with.

After a time, I get out, too hot, and lie on the flat, black surface, letting the wind cool me off. It is glorious. I stare at the empty blue sky. When I get cool enough, I’ll go back to cooking myself.

I stare for a while.

Nothing happens.

I sit up in a semi-crouch, cross-legged with my knees in the air, leaning forward on my hands. Someone moves next to me, imitating my position. His head is mostly shaved to the scalp, except for the side closest to me, which has a haphazard criss-cross cut into an uneven patch of very short, dark hair.

His teeth are criminally crooked. He has a severe overbite.

Who are you?

He doesn’t answer my question.

IT’S BEAUTIFUL, ISN’T IT?

Yes. 

He has spoken with the tone of someone satisfied with his work.

Did you create this place?

He nods.

YOU DID, TOO.

I push this away. I don’t want to create anything here. I just want to show up and discover.

What do you do here? 

NOTHING MUCH.

You greet your visitors.

I DON’T GET A LOT OF THOSE.

On the beach, the sand moves. A large mouth yawns. Maybe … that’s not a beach after all.

Do you have to feed that?

NO.

I imagine this is why visitors don’t come here.

IT’S NOT LIKE THAT.

Do you know how I can un-tell myself? Or hear the quiet voices that never get the floor?

He shrugs.

Maybe one of your visitors told you. What’s the most interesting thing any of them has said?

He doesn’t respond.

I get back in the pool and submerge myself fully, like the frog in the pot of gradually hotter and hotter water. Except maybe this is right, not terrible, for the frog. To be transformed into something nourishing and ready to share with others.

Like me not listening to fight-or-flight, and getting killed by the lion. Accepting that as my contribution. 

I remember the couple times I thought I was going to die, and saying to myself in those moments, I had a good run. Maybe that only happened because I was nowhere close to death. I find myself wishing, hoping that whatever end I eventually meet, I’ll greet it with those words.

I stay down here in the hot hot hot for a while. There is no rush.

When I poke my head out of the water, the man is watching me from the edge of the pool.

Were you worried?

He laughs.

NO.

I want to learn how to un-tell myself.

His hands move to his mouth. He adjusts his teeth, as if they are on separate tracks, like sliding doors. For a moment, a couple of them are straight. But he keeps moving them until they are as crazily crooked as before, just in a different order of not-right.

I regard him for a moment. I sense he’s telling me to ask myself why I believe in straight so much. Why can’t crooked, circuitous, be just as true?

Truer?

I bend my head down and reach up into my mouth, sliding my teeth past each other, running my tongue along the backs of the new sequences, playing with this combo, then that, until my teeth run at odd angles, at odds with each other.

I look up at him and smile.

His grin matches mine.