Skál Sarah Spaulding

Circles of Return

Frances Koziar

I don’t know why I’m going back exactly, except that that island used to be a place where you found answers, and I need those. I still don’t really know, and still don’t think it’s a good idea, even as I’m setting the canoe into the water of the lake—it’s a rental, which is wrong too. Wronglike everything that happened. Wronglike the island must be now, after so long.

My wife died nearly 20 years ago, when we were 30. My beautiful, bright and optimistic wife. With her around, it had been easier to believe in something. With her around, I had the faith that my elders had once spoken with, that life was a gift and a blessing and a lesson.

But who I was then feels like a blip against the rest of my life now. Against how, in the crash that took her life, I lost my ability to work, and was forced into a life of poverty on government disability. Of how now, hope seemed like some distant light shining from the endless parties of the financially privileged, just over that wall bordering our slums.

The island was still intact when I was a child. Intactis perhaps a jaded word. Sacredthe elders would have said. I only went there once, for my rite into adulthood. I was 12, and nonbinary and gender-fluid even then. We canoed there, a single elder and I. When we neared the island, we stopped speaking.

As I climb into my brazenly green canoe now, at the age of 49, I close my eyes for a moment and remember. I remember climbing out of the canoe onto my knees. Remember crawling to the centre of the small island, covered with purple flowers and wild leeks and raw bedrock poking free. Remember praying for the blessing of the Divine in that sacred place, too sacred to stand, too sacred for more than the elder and I. I remember looking back over my shoulder after we had crawled back to the canoe. Remember the feeling of awe within me, that I can’t remember the last time I felt now.

The waves around me sound the same as they did back then, lapping at the hull of the canoe, but then I hear a car in the distance, and open my eyes. My vision is blurry with tears, and I only feel surprised—weary, despondent surprise—that such things can still make me cry.

I begin to paddle, and without thinking, I begin to sing, as we always did on long trips. The rhythm of my strokes matches the rhythm of the song, but singing makes me keenly aware that I am alone on this lake, in what they now call a park. My voice is not pretty, like me. It is old and broken and lost, but it still sounds.

I am wearing a mismatch of ragged garments—some traditionally female, some male—and the bracelets on my wrist jangle slightly with each stroke. I think of the soup kitchens I frequent, and feel foolish to come looking for something that no longer exists. But I think of the shared house that is all I can afford, of never having the privacy to pray Title aloud where someone won’t hear me, and I don’t want to go back. It was hard enough getting here.

“An island where you ask a god questions?” an outsider had asked, and I remember that question clearly, from those days before. I also remember my final image and nightmare of the island: a line-up of people asking questions of someone claiming to be in contact with the Divine. All standing. All trampling the flowers and the untouched undergrowth as a cheap diversion.

The elders are gone too, or I would have sought them out. They probably knew as little as the rest of us, but maybe it would be something. Maybe they could tell me what I’m hanging on for, here at the end of all I knew. But they died before seeing too much of what came of this place, and that, too, is a blessing. Now, things are quieter again, but my people are still gone, still pushed out, still lost to the memories that haunt me.

I see the island ahead, and worry stirs in my gut. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see what it has become.

The trees are still there, I note, my dark eyes darting back and forth over the tiny shape in the distance. Not cut down, at least. The arrowhead still speckles the water by the shore, where the bedrock rises up. But I don’t see the purple flowers.

And of course, I don’t see my people either. No one is here to ask a blessing, no one is in the neighbouring village, long since destroyed by the people who now live in these lands.

Two answers come to me as I near the island, as clear as meltwater in springtime, and I finally understand why I have come: I have come seeking memories of my people, memories of faith and hope and goodness, if memories are all I can have. And I have come because I am soon to turn 50: the age at which I would have become a young elder, would have moved into the role and responsibility of caring and teaching the community officially.

It is laughable, now. I have no community but those I eat with: the outcasts of a world where whether or not you can work is the only thing that really matters. And I have no answers even if I had others to teach: every year in poverty makes it harder to remember what bettermeans, and harder still to believe in it.

Author Story

I stop thinking before my canoe touches the shore—the way we used to stop speaking. Are they here?I wonder, my voice like the child I was. Could the Divine still be in such a place?

I remember that elder, the woman who paddled with me to my blessing of adulthood. I copy her now, in my mind’s eye. I remove my shoes and step barefoot into the cold, ankle deep water. The water cleanses my feet, and yet still, I feel unworthy of this place. I stay low, pull the canoe up a bit from a kneeling position, and begin to crawl. It feels like I am a child, or going back to being one, and the position forces me to keep my head low, in deference. Maybe that was the point; I forget many of the teachings now. Perhaps I am to remember that I am nothing against the forces of the world, and that this world is everything: it is all of us and none of us and the spaces between.