Lake Leary

“The cops are coming!
I think I see tornadoes!
The lake is alive!”

We walked on either side of Sanx. India’s olive eyes shot me a question: windowpane? I nodded and held up two fingers. In that same moment, we each took one of Sanx’s trembling hands. The hand I held felt skeletal and frozen. Again Sanx spoke in acid-urgency:

“That cloud is angry!
I’m becoming my children!
Your hands are water!”

The jagged lines of lightning were God’s sneezes against the blackening backdrop sky. Linked, we continued along the wood-chip path around the shaken lake. The electricity of Sanx’s state of mind was magnet for the storm, or so it seemed to me as thunder closed in – a drum circle round-up.

“Nothing can hurt us.
Together we’re strength itself.
Light magnificent.”

I resisted the urge to burst forth with laughter, or tears – either would have been appropriate. God sneezed again and again. It was spectacularly scary to India and me, but Sanx was precariously unafraid. She used the light as opportunity to lay longing gazes at suddenly spot-lit landscapes.

“Let’s hold trees as lovers,
making brethren of the squirrel
sharing nut and nest.”

Nut is right, I heard in my head. Wisely, India and I led Sanx under a pavilion shelter of the kind of wood which fills your nose and feels like a hobbit’s home. For hours, she stroked the walls and spoke haiku, as lake and storm and drug were layered unsteady on her fragile china mind. It was enough, and more. And then it was too much.