I Watched the Light Change on the Water
Photo by Kim Ukura
By Kim Ukura
When I moved to Madison at the end of the summer, I lived alone and had a lot of time to fill. I started watching Six Feet Under, HBO’s series about a family of funeral home owners, and fell into a paranoid funk where I was constantly anxious about my own death. In one particular episode, “The Invisible Woman,” an unpleasant, friendless, single woman who lives alone with her cats comes home for dinner and chokes on a mouthful of peas. With no one around to give her the Heimlich, she suffocates, violently falling on the floor as she gasps for breath. One week later, her partially decomposed body is found after a neighbor complains about the smell coming from the apartment.
After I watched that episode, I consciously chewed every bite of food before swallowing. I frequently updated my Facebook status, hopeful that if people didn’t hear from me for a couple days they’d come looking. And I made an effort to actually get out of my apartment, to spend time in places where, if taken ill, I had a chance to be saved.
I started going to the park each night to read. After dinner I packed up my blanket, my water bottle, and my book and walked six blocks to James Madison Park. On my first visit the park was almost uncomfortably crowded with sunbathers and basketball players, couples walking puppies and a shirts-versus-skins game of ultimate frisbee. None of them paid attention to me except to apologize for their terrier running off his leash or a neon yellow frisbee winging uncomfortably close to my face, but they were people. I walked through the melee and spread my fleece blanket under the perfect tree – not too thick, facing towards the lake, with smooth bark and a space between the roots that I fit into just right.
As the sun set over the lake, I felt less certain I would die alone before I managed to accomplish anything. I put my book aside and I watched the light change on the water.
Category: Issue 0.5
Great post, I enjoyed reading it!
lovely photo
marinela x x
[...] have two stories up on the site. One is called “I Watched the Light Change on the Water,” a short piece about life right after I moved to Madison two years ago. The second is [...]