Teaspoon doesn’t understand.  He mouths platitudes about “getting over it” and “moving on”, pats me on the shoulder, and then continues about his business.  He’s lost a rider.  I’ve lost a brother.  More than a brother.  It hurts. 

It hurts so much. 

The night sky presses down on me, a cushion of bruised velvet, and I find it hard to breathe.  My fingernails dig into the porch rail as the air thickens around me, clutching at my chest like a persistent beggar.  I feel like I must surely crumble under its unrelenting surge.  I gasp, reaching out instinctively. 

But Ike is gone. 

My lifeline is gone. 

I had been used to the cool dank waters, once upon a time.  With my people, I was trapped in a world where I didn’t belong.  Where I could never be accepted.  Accusation and condemnation flowed around me and past me, and sometimes reached out icy tendrils to trickle along my spine as I bobbed on the waves.  When it did, the swells became enormous and the tide threatened to pull me under.  If I’d stayed with my people, I would have drowned in that vast and merciless sea. 

So I ran away. 

I thought things would be different at the mission school.  I was wrong.  The depthless ocean followed me to the white world, and again I learned how to float.  I learned to keep my head above the water no matter what the white world threw at me.  I swallowed much brine, but I never stayed long beneath the waves.  I took pride in that. 

Then I met Ike. 

I run my fingers through my hair and look at the stars, saloon-girl sequins against a backdrop of black lacquer.  It hurts.  It hurts to remember.  It hurts to think.  It hurts to breathe. 

Ike was a scrappy little fellow, all long legs and bulging eyes, with a nose too big for his face.  He grew into the nose.  And he fought like a demon, even if we did get whupped.  At first I thought he swam in his own sea, but Ike was always firmly anchored to the ground.  Every arrow tossed by malicious school boy or insensitive Sister hit him directly in the heart.  Wounded him.  But he refused to retreat to the water, where the detachment could offer some protection.  He wanted to be part of the land.  Of the world. 

And slowly, he led me from the depths of my seclusion.  He challenged apathy. He brought me to the world. 

I fought him at the beginning.  Isolation can be blissful.  But he accepted me – a first in my life.  Half-breed, heathen, savage.  Friend.  I came to like the word.  I came to like the world. 

Sometimes the dark pools still beckoned, but Ike kept me grounded.  Did he know that?  Did he know that it was his presence that stopped me from floating away?  Because I wanted to.  A rubbish pile of abuse and scorn heaped upon us daily; fear and uncertainty the rule rather than the exception.  It hurts so much more without the dubious comfort of indifference that is found in those glacial waters. 

We stuck together.  We got through it.  We even found a family.  I began to think about the future.  Finding a wife, settling down.  So did Ike.  The world was at our feet.  We had everything to live for.  We were part of the world, and that frigid pond drifted away until it was but a speck of darkness against the kaleidoscope that our lives had become. 

Now Ike is dead. 

The waves thunder around me.  My lifeline is gone.  And I’ve forgotten how 
to swim.