the timboucher experience

“This isn’t the weirdest thing I’ve ever done,” I said, carefully stuffing long stems into my bag so as not to crush the white flowers.

“I don’t think it’s that weird.”

We began walking back towards the car.

“Good,” I said, adding mentally: maybe this can go somewhere.

Rain fell lightly. A man in a yellow coat walked two Golden Retrievers not far from us.

“Let’s walk diagonally through here,” I nudged.

“I don’t think he’s coming over here.”

She was right. Muffling my guilty conscience, I wondered if this would have been harder or easier without her here. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone through with it had I not had someone to show off to. Look how weird I am.

The car was warm. We kissed.

“Thanks for coming with me.”

She didn’t mind my bragging. We worked in theatre, after all. Closing night of the season. What came next was anybody’s guess. This incarnation of the company would scatter to the wind, never to reassemble. I wanted to mark it somehow, the summer I finally learned how to swim after twenty-nine years of needless fear. The summer I learned to throw doubles and juggle with a partner… I’d spent all summer trying to “skill up”, as my friend liked to say – as though life were a video game. Does love work the same way? I’d often wondered. Over ice cream, at the beach, silently driving to work each day. I was getting a lot of practice.

The leading lady was a whore. Not literally, but she played one. The classic trope: rich white man saves soulful prostitute. Though this time everybody dies; dark side erupts, everything goes down in flames. Lesson learned? Who cares – the show was a bore. I was glad to see it go, though I would have let the summer linger. Stay down at the beach a little longer…

When I gave the leading lady her flowers, she was touched. Until I told her they were from a graveyard. Dismay.

“It’s a tradition,” I offered. Confusion. She didn’t have time to respond, and rushed out to curtain call clutching them in her hand, bowing, crying.

“What’s with the white flowers?” she demanded later on.

“It’s an old tradition,” I told her. “A superstition. On closing night, you’re supposed to give the leading lady a bouquet of flowers from a cemetery.”

A pause. She didn’t question it, seeming touched that I considered her to be the leading lady.

Leading lady or no, she’s not the one who taught me to swim. Sometimes its the people behind the scenes who matter most, even if nobody on the outside knows it.

“What do you think it is?” she exclaimed in delight.

Each step we took that night, our footprints became illuminated. Bioluminescence, something in the sand speaking to us.

“Maybe they’re little jellyfish. Maybe every time we step on them, they’re dying - crying out.” On their beautiful deaths we danced, marsh water licking at our feet. Up on the dunes we laid down, under shooting stars – the smiles of a summer night.

I stuck my tongue out when I was learning to let my feet up off the bottom. A habit I’ve had while concentrating ever since childhood. I remember drawing at the kitchen table with my older brother, tongue out, trying my hardest. And years later, letting go, trusting in my own buoyancy. I asked myself in the water: what’s the worst that could happen? Going under unexpectedly, saltwater up my nose choking, panic setting in. And then pushing myself into that same space on purpose, again and again. Going under. Her watching patiently – laughing where appropriate. Letting me take my time. Giving me the space to practice. Maybe love is a learnable skill. You just put your face in the water, kick your feet up, let your body do the rest. Let it all work as one, limbs and trunks together in a fluid language of union. Freedom, surrender. Waves crashing, rising up with them. Hurricanes only come towards the end of summer. The ebb and flow of her hair…

This isn’t the strangest thing I’ve ever done, letting go of fear.

White flowers plucked from a knocked over vase, “We miss you so much,” a card read on a nearby bouquet.

“We think of you every day.”

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