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CURSE WORD Lark Lasky
Once I said, at eight years old in a dress made starched for funeral and wedding “I swear to God I saw the ocean.” We raced, he and I, and the adults further down that stretch of sand likely thought we were siblings. Lucas dared me to do it, and when I stepped forward and felt where the ground was no longer burning at my skin, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong at all. There was the lake. Which one, I don’t know. It was the lake, one of ten thousand, and it didn’t look like a lake at all. Maybe it was really that beautiful; maybe our childish imaginations made the pictures different in our heads. I could see the bottom, as far back as I could look, I could see the daring bottom through water that was turquoise, the way it looked on the pamphlets. The way it was supposed to look far away from here. We weren’t at the lake. We were at the ocean. The ocean, this striking new concept which only existed next to the word vacation or trip out east, never here. But Lucas said it, wading behind me, and then I said it too. Ocean, ocean, ocean! I did not know I was infected, then. I am much older now, and I know that was a lake, and I know what it really means to swear to God. I have picked dirty things and things that were too clean from under my nails, and both had me clawing for hours at soap and hot water so that I could make sure I knew it was gone. I never much learned how to appreciate continuity or moderation. I have seen things that magnetize like car crashes, I have touched scale and skin and slick. I grew taller and the things within me grew sharper, meaner, stronger to hold and easier to carry. I believe they are things from the dawn, that first dawn. Man saw the sunrise and man thought it was beautiful
