Mitch knew her before she was born. They met inside a house on Cape Cod, inside himself. He was deep and quiet like the sea outside the window. He said he could remember nearly drowning as a kid, when he sank down to the bottom of the turquoise world, and everything was quiet and turquoise and peaceful. He said meditation is like drowning. He meditated for __ years. He meditated in Cape Cod in a cottage, while his wife was skinny with a baby in her belly, and he talked to the baby, inside himself, and smiled.

Then he told everyone what she told him: that she was a girl, a strong girl, and she was named Sarah. She would be a photojournalist, she said, and she must not go to the middle east in her twenty-third year. Because then they would lose each other.
He gained 28 pounds and gallbladder disease and a prophecy in those nine months; his wife, Rose gained twenty six pounds and a cup size and some fear. And together they lost a good marriage. And two good jobs, and a good house.
They would say it was worth it for an exceptionally good daughter, who, by the way, never believed them.
They would also say that was a time of great change: Everything old fell apart and everything new was constructed.
Old house. Old friends. Old marriage. Old Connecticut.
New kid. New friends. New affairs. New Florida.
Florida. They grew warm in Florida, and grew to despise Florida.
But she’s getting ahead of herself.
When her pointy head emerged from her round womb to a square room, she didn’t cry. Her mother grimaced as her baby fell grinning into the hand she’d just spent ___ hours silently holding, drowning with her husband, with ice melting in her mouth with unbearable pain in her body. She never cried. He never let go, except to get her some more soda-fountain ice. Together, they never forgot that, and often told that to their daughter, who grew to admire her mother’s silence, and grew to cry silently.
Crying was her only silence. She said her first word at three months, and it was book. The word foreshadowed her later obsession with the things: reading them, composing plots for them, discarding them. Book, she said, as she looked into the room with the shelves that were filled with them, little face, eyes big, room big. Book, she said every time they carried her in there. Book.

As a child, two things seemed realer than anything she experienced later:
1. Her life was a book.
2. She could fly.
She flew everyday, as a child, in front of everyone, but no one ever remembered.

Labels: By Ana