Party in the Shallow End

I said yes to the birthday party because I'd said no

three times already and you can only say no

three times before people stop believing

you have a reason.

So I drove to the rec center with a wrapped gift

from the clearance aisle, something with magnets,

and I stood in the shallow end in trunks I bought

that morning because the old ones

didn't fit, and someone handed me

a paper plate of cake, white frosting

already softening in the heat,

and I held it above the water line

like it mattered, like saving the cake

was the one task I could handle

without thinking too hard—

and then I looked down.

My legs.

Pale and rippling at the knees

like a signal losing its frequency,

the hair on my shins lifting and waving

in the slow current of seven-year-olds

cannonballing off the edge,

and the blue-painted floor made my skin

look translucent, almost

diagrammatic, like I could see the blueprint

of whatever I was supposed to become

before I became this—

standing in three feet of chlorinated water

holding grocery store cake above my head

at a party where I knew exactly

two people, one of them

under four feet tall.

I haven't looked at my own body

submerged in anything

since I was fifteen, maybe sixteen,

since the last summer I went to the lake

and didn't think about going to the lake,

just went,

and I didn't know I'd been avoiding it

until I wasn't.

The frosting slid off the plate

into the water. A kid screamed

with joy about something unrelated.

I watched the white streak dissolve

between my ankles

and I stood there

like a man who has just realized

he's been holding his breath

for a reason he can't