Lucky Ones

Written on October 10, 2024

The floods came the morning of our 10th wedding anniversary. While we were in Costa Rica toasting to what comes next, the water came and took everything that had been. When we got back to our home to see, it was worse than I could have imagined - like seeing a dead body of a close friend that you didn’t even know had been sick. No life, barely a form there to recognize - and also like a feeling of ‘I’d know you anywhere.’ The days that followed were like a waking nightmare, followed by my sleeping nightmares. We get up, go to the makeshift food place outside a hotel - they also had no power, no water, no wifi - but somehow there was food. Food and coffee. Coffee with baby formula as creamer but I didn’t mind. Chemicals are chemicals. It’s in that parking lot that I started hearing about the bodies. The bodies dead, the bodies lost, the bodies buried in the mud and the trees. I wondered if I was one of those bodies they were talking about. I couldn’t feel my body.  Couldn’t really hear what people were saying - so maybe they weren’t really talking to me. I couldn’t look in the mirror to check - my mirrors were broken and there was no power to see anyway. I looked down. These weren’t my clothes. I think these were my shoes, but also they might be my mom’s shoes. Anything that reminded me of me was gone - tossed in the trash heap of our mud lawn. So maybe I had died. My journals and cards were waterlogged - almost impossible to read. There was nothing I could have done to save everything - and now there was everything to do to save anything. Racing around the corpse of our home grabbing whatever wasn’t covered in sludge. Then going in back in for the things that were. If we could wash these toys for Bradshaw they might be ok - oh right, no water. No flushing toilets. We had to use the water from our own creek - the creek that had turned against us so quickly to flush our own shit. Maybe that’s payback. But I’m not even mad, not really, not mad at the water anyway. Maybe I’m mad at myself for letting myself care so much about things. About that special outfit, that original artwork for Bradshaw, that stuffed animal, the linen tray Seth had made for our linen anniversary. It’s just stuff. It’s just things. It’s just a bed - the bed where Bradshaw was born. It’s just a room. It’s just where we adorned Simone cat with flowers and said goodbye to her. It’s just where we celebrated Christmas with everyone we loved and showed off. It’s just our home. It’s just where we wove our stories and dreamt about the future. Where we’d get into our luscious bed every Sunday night with fresh sheets after a long shower and we’d both say “Ahh, one of the great pleasures of life right here - a clean body in a fresh bed. We are so lucky,” we’d say. And I guess we still are.