I realize that I never wrote about the Lake Powell trip. My memories of it reside in my tangible journal and my scrapbook... and my head. Odd now that I can't remember much. I remember laughing a lot. I remember far too much water. Or rather, it seemed like too much when I leaped from a twenty-foot cliff into it, Alex's whisper echoing in my ear. "You rock. You can totally do this."
I hate that I remember the heat the most. The dry, insufferable heat on the first night, the dusty wind rattling in my head. I hate the wind... I've never been sure why. It frightens me in ways that nothing else quite can, and this wind was a desert wind. Not like the coldly seductive winds I was used to. It was beating me to a pulp, to a nothing.
My head was sick from the heat already. I hadn't eaten much dinner, and I longed for nothing but Alex's arms... but I couldn't stand the heat of them. I began to panic. Near the back door of the houseboat, I gripped his hands, frightened. I don't remember it well, but I could have gone crazy in that second. I wanted to leap from the boat, sinking to the bottom of the water, just to escape the heat, the dry wind, the sand. Scalding tears spilled down my cheeks. Worried, Alex led me inside and pushed me down on the folded-out pleathery couch. He called for his dad.
I don't remember much after that. I remember thinking that everyone else was probably suffering from heat, just like me, why were they fussing, I didn't really need them to, please don't even think about going to the marina. But I didn't say a word. Everything seemed so dark. Alex sat at my side, stroking my arm. He said later that I kept taking the ice pack from my head and wringing out the towel, then trying to hand it to him. Lemon-lime Gatorade was repeatedly coaxed down my throat. I remember Jory coming downstairs, crowing about his magickal idea to turn his beanie into a personal cooling system by soaking it in ice water. Rae pressured me into the shower.
I regained memory when I had been sitting in the stream of water for a few minutes. I was intolerably cold now, and when I clambered out of the shower, my face frightened me. I rubbed at the dark circles under my eyes, dressed, and came back to bed. Comforting fingers stroked at my hair as I drifted to sleep, a bottle of Gatorade clenched against my cheek, an icy cloth on my forehead.
It's strange I remember that most clearly, out of anything. The blue-green water faded, the red rocks dissolved. Lifejackets and sunscreen were stored away. But I remember, that for half an hour on the most wonderful trip in the world, I lost my mind.
Who decided we should have heat, anyway.