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"Time Travel"
I have learned to go back and walk around and find the windows and doors. Outside it is hot, the pines are black, the lake laps. It is 1955 and I am looking for my father. I walk from a small room to a big one through a doorway. The walls and floors are pine, full of splinters. I come upon him.
I can possess him like this, the funnies rising and falling on his big stomach, his big, solid secret body where he puts the bourbon. He belongs to me forever like this, the red plaid shirt, the baggy pants, the perfectly turned legs, the soft padded hands folded across his body, the hair dark as a burnt match, the domed, round eyes closed, the firm mouth. Sleeping it off, in the last summer the family was together. I have learned to walk
so quietly into that summer no one knows I am there. He rests easy as a baby. Upstairs, mother weeps. Out in the tent, my brother reads my diary. My sister is changing boyfriends somewhere in a car and down by the shore of the lake there is a girl twelve years old, watching the water fold and disappear. I walk up behind her, I touch her shoulder, she turns her head—
I see my face. She looks through me up at the house. This is the one I have come for. I gaze in her eyes, the waves, thick as the air in hell, curling in over and over. She does not know any of this will ever stop. She does not know she is the one survivor.
—Sharon Olds
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