My father sat in a yellow inflatable life raft that hovered 300 feet above the open sea. Paddles stuck out and down on either side, like the ends of an oversized, straddling wishbone. He was untroubled. I was with him in the boat, listening to him tell long stories about his childhood and events in history. We were in clouds, and the water below was beautiful. Everything exuded peace and calm. My father was animated as he told the stories, filling in details I never heard before, or pieces of information about the past that he found intriguing. He told me about times in my own young childhood, when he and my mother were still married, times that I had long forgotten or was too young to remember at the time. He finished talking, then looked at me. With a slight scowl on his face, he told me he despised me so much. Without warning, he knocked me overboard. I hurtled to the sea below and fell in with a great big splash. The force of the fall plunged me as deep into the water as I had been high in the boat. I was too startled to think; one instant I had been in the air and the next, I was a bottom dweller, with the fish. Only there was no bottom: the sea was dark, cold, and filled with mysteries and dangers I did not want to know. In the next second I was bouncing back up, gathering speed as I went, until I flew out of the surface with a great burst, sheer momentum propelling me into the sky, straight toward my father in his boat. I surpassed him, going hundreds of feet higher into the air, until gradually I slowed down and came back to his level. I reached the boat and grabbed sloppily on to its bulging rubber sides. My father turned his head around slowly to look at me, as though I had sneezed and disrupted his reverie. His eyes spoke nothing to me. “Why did you do that?” I asked. He ignored my question but instead began recounting another story from years past, once again becoming animated, allowing me to climb back into the boat, as though nothing had happened. And again he grew irritated and angry with me and flung me off the boat. Again I plunged into the water and shot out, straight up, like a cannon. Breathless, I grasped onto the boat once more, dripping with cold salt water, fighting tears I did not have the energy to expend. My father’s affect was flat. It was as though he was running a science experiment, and intending no harm, harboring no ill will or anger at all. Instead he seemed curious, wondering if we could repeat the circumstances. I felt a sharp emotional pain, a rejection, that my own father would not give me safety, but instead would shove me away into known danger, risking my life, just to see what the effects would be. After this continued for some time, and I was exhausted, a boat came along on the water and rescued me, stopping the cycle. It was filled with friends. I somehow felt sorry for leaving my father behind.

Posted by Heather B on 30 July 2005 at 9:44 am.