Nightswimming deserves a quiet night.  I’m not sure all these people understand.  – REM

Knock-off Gucci watch with the red and green band, bought at Playland in 1980’s Time Square where the suburban under-aged went for fake ID’s to get into local bars like Jo-Jo’s, Striders and Tammany Hall.

Hesitant barefoot girl places the fake designer watch on slippery rocks right below Davenport Park, sliding out of her clothes she slips into the night water like a nubile seal. Nervous adolescent laughter pealing, magnificent backlit skinny dippers shimmering in Long Island Sound. The long-time friends singe their skin in the white moonlight, filling their young lungs with musky smells and sweet humidity. The recklessness of water pulling the high school seniors toward each other.

On a different set of rocks but in the same park, the girl’s mother will sit in a few months and script in her beautiful Catholic school penmanship the first of many intuitive letters to her lost girl in an upstate college. Using her subtle but fierce motherly love disguised as benign letters and vowels, she will attempt to tether her swiftly drifting daughter busy waging her self-declared battle; Perfection vs. Acceptance, Loathing vs. Love.

Back in the park decades later sitting above the spot where the small beach used
to be, the barefoot girl now a woman and mother, takes in the new colonial mansions with their sweeping water vistas filled with families lacking an understanding of the hallowed ground upon which they sit.

The fake Gucci watch lost that night was baptized with the rest in the stark moonlight, alone but not forgotten as the tide came in; gone but grateful to have witnessed the Catalina crew seal their pact by night swimming.

Walking down to the rocks where her mother wrote her letters long ago, the woman wishes they could sit so she could ask her how she did it. How did she let her daughter go? How did she let her face the howling wind alone, naked and afraid of her own shadow?

The woman closes her eyes inhaling the salty air filled with sorrow and longing
for her young self, for her young mother. She draws her attention to the warm rock beneath
her, feels the gathering clouds around her waiting to be let in. A gull calls in the distance.

As she raises her hand to shield her eyes, she notices her mother’s weathered freckles
and knobby knuckles, the same oval cuticles and prominent blue veins. The gull calls again
to be sure the woman is listening. Then she places her hand on her chest and whispers a prayer of thanksgiving to her persistent mother for always being with her, even now.

As for the question the woman had for her mother about letting go? It turns out she had the answer all along. It had been stitched into her innermost places by patient freckled hands
for her to remember on hard days when they came, which they did. When she would bear witness to her sons dangling from precipitous cliff branches over fiery pits without nets.

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