zoë fairweather
This past October I ran into some childhood friends and I was struck with a weird melancholic reminiscence. I was waiting around at my brothers’ cross country meet in between races when I was greeted with a friendly tap on my shoulder and a distantly familiar “heyyy girl”. Both of which come from an elementary school friend I haven’t had a meaningful conversation with since fifth grade. I turned around and saw her in all her sixteen-year-old glory, and yet simultaneously I saw the girl I met eleven years prior, who wore only matching outfits with her twin sister and had yet to grow into her nose. This little girl stared at me expectantly and I suddenly felt like passing out. I’m not entirely sure how to explain the kind of dull pain that hit me when I was confronted with a souvenir of my childhood all aged up with its own life that had nothing to do with mine. For me, nostalgia has always been a desperate and painful kind of yearning for the past, as opposed to a wistful affection for it.
We got to talking and she told me she was there to see her twin sister– an equally close childhood friend– race for their school. When her twin sister showed up and we exchanged unimportant niceties, I had what could only be described as a blockbuster movie style flashback to a weekend in the spring of third grade. It was as if my brain had been picked out of that moment and thrown into another universe altogether, and then back into real life, all in a matter of seconds.
This weekend was significant because, for some (now barely memorable) reason, I was staying over at their house for two whole nights and I was ecstatic about it. Nowadays, the prospect of a two day sleepover would send my social battery into anaphylactic shock, but there’s something about being a little girl with a loving family and a happy life that makes you want to go anywhere else as far away from it as possible, for as long as possible. It was a wonderful weekend full of tomato soup and tea parties, but there was a specific memory I recalled at that moment with one of the sisters on my last day at their house.
It was just the two of us taking a walk up the creek by their house. We walked and walked and laughed and talked for what felt like hours, and as we continued further up the creek and further from her house, the water got deeper. And as that water got deeper, my little pink velcro new balances got soggier, and the trees grew flusher against each other, and I felt more and more separated from the person I had been when I woke up that morning. It sounds dramatic, but everything I did in third grade was dramatic. We reached a point where the creek was wider and the water was up to six feet deep, and as if it was the most natural thing in the world, we ventured to go for a swim. I remember so vividly how the murky water felt running through my hair and completely soaking my clothes, and I remember the sounds from the birds and the smell of the muddy bank. It was as if we had stumbled upon our very own garden of Eden. We floated in place and let that holy water cleanse us, and for a moment I believed I was native to that body of water.
The summer following my family and I were at the beach, and I almost drowned in a riptide. Ever since, I’ve had this horrible fear of open water and I haven’t been able to swim anywhere other than a pool. That day, up to my chin in dirty creek water and fully clothed, was the last time I was able to enjoy nature in that way. That experience at the beach set me on this anti nature crusade that I only managed to understand after seeing those girls from my childhood.
That fear has triggered this really intense resentment of nature and subsequently a really intense guilt. I’ve spent so many years trying desperately to distance myself from something that was so integral to my upbringing. I used to dream about owning a farm and I loved gardening with my mom, and I feel so bad for rejecting all those parts of me, just because of some arbitrary fear.
I came home from that cross country just a little bit changed. Again, sounds dramatic, but it’s how I feel. I feel so much obligation and gratitude for the little girl who ate worms and played in the mud and didn’t feel less cool for it. She wasn’t afraid of nature and I no longer want to be either. I don’t know if I’m going to be cliff diving into the ocean anytime soon, but I could afford to go on a hike or do some gardening every so often. I want to stay loyal to her and I want to live my life in a way that would make her proud.