Photo by Peter Robbins on Unsplash
I am kayaking with my son on the river that once caught fire and has never been allowed another personality, has only been judged in terms of progress from that day, though there were other fires, worse fires, and other flaming rivers. My son has given up, we’ve gone too long, too far, and he lies down for a sunburnt rest, paddle tucked under arm.
I’m nearly 45 and suddenly waiting for perimenopause, thinking about how one day I won’t be able to paddle us back if my son decides to lie down in the kayak, thinking about how I may never be prettier or thinner than I am today, thinking about how being disappointed by my body is the only thing that is never new. I was five and already my body knew trained hunger, already I kept a pair of jeans to wedge myself into, to judge myself in terms of growth: already my body was too thick, I could barely get the jeans zipped, already I lacked willpower, already I was a pathetic excuse for a girl.
My mother caught me wedging myself into the jeans, her face dark and murky as the river—like an afterschool special, I learned to want to small myself out of existence from you, mom—and she threw out the jeans because even in trying to please I could only disappoint.
The river caught fire many times, but for some reason, that one time it mattered and now the river is always remembered for catching fire though the water that caught fire flowed and evaporated and rained down again and again, it ran down gutters and seeped into soil to feed the flowers, and I paddle and paddle and paddle through it while a blister forms on my thumb and my shoulders ache but I want to keep moving because one day I will stop and not be able to start again because one day I will be too old to do this, my body leeched of calcium and void of muscle tone but I don’t want my son to ever feel he has to say, don’t worry mom, I’ve got this, I want him to always believe I can still do it and to remember what I hope I’ve taught him by then: a river never carries the same water twice.
[1] “‘Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown,’ Cleveland’s citizens joke grimly. ‘He decays.’” From America’s Sewage System and the Price of Optimism, Time Magazine, Friday, Aug. 01, 1969.
Stephanie Frazee’s work has appeared in Centaur, Delicate Machinery: Poems for Survival & Healing (Sundress Publications, 2025), Midwest Weird, Variant Literature, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She is online at www.stephaniefrazee.com and @stephieosaurus.bsky.social.
