Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

life of a way that no longer fit.
    The women were gentle with her. Placing all her small belongings—toothbrush and paste, soap, eyeglasses—within her reach.
             
    Of what are you thinking? asked Avoa.
    I am thinking of the moment something dies and how we instinctively know it. And of how we try not to know what we know because we do not yet understand how we are to negotiate change.
    From death back into life?
    From death, being dead, back into life, yes, she said.
    Each night the crew set up the Porta Potti latrine in the most exquisite location imaginable. Tonight, under a huge canopy of stars, she sat like a queen, the flashing, roaring river silver in the moonlight. She thought of how diligently she’d worked to free herself. Difficult because of the shock she was in, discovering she was trapped. Captured most of all by possessions.
    They’d bought a fairly large house, two floors, seven rooms, every one of which had to be filled. She groaned, now on the toilet, thinking about it. And yet they’d both rushed to the task. Buying things. It had excited them. Rug after perfect rug they’d bought. They’d bought silver. And linens. Chairs. A dining set. At some point, she thought, but wasn’t sure, an electric knife. Now she couldn’t imagine owning or using one. And they’d bought couches and lamps and footrests and stools and more art than she cared to recall. She had loved it, the art, more than anything else. Yet when she knew she must leave, the art became the heaviest purchase. He loved it too. And how do you divide a Matisse, even if it is only a print?
    The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon’s walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens. It was, this freedom she was in, the longed-for cathedral of her dreams.
    You will come back so different, Yolo had said, before she left on her journey, holding her loosely about the waist and gazing down at her. For months he’d felt, every time he held her, a kind of humming coming from her body. A buzzing. Energy being amassed, stored, building to the bursting point. And yet, when he mentioned this to her she said she felt no such activity. She felt instead dull, lethargic, as though she were solid, stuck.
    Not so, he’d insisted. Your molecules are singing.
    I don’t hear them, she’d drily replied.
    And if I change? she’d asked, looking at him intently, wanting to catch his most instinctive response. What will that mean to you? To herself she was thinking: Of course I will change; at least I hope so. Pray so. Without changing I will be doomed to stay my present self and I’m so weary of that!
    I will still adore you, he said, kissing the top of her head. Only more so, probably.
    She laughed. As he did so often, he’d offered the best possible response. It freed her. Now she could imagine a return. She saw herself flying back home, swooping in through a window, a large black bird. Transformed. Still welcome. Now she could go.
    She mentioned to the oarswomen, but no more than that, the diarrhea. As her body spasmed and cramped and the precious fluids she was being given by Avoa disappeared into the elegantly situated latrine, she thought of the French characterization (she’d read it in an Englishman’s book) of the English as people with a “talent” for diarrhea. Always, when they travel, getting it, having it, or looking for a place to have it. It humanized the English in a way that tickled her and so she smiled, even as she felt concern about her dizziness. She would not go home, though. Returning before ending her sojourn on the river was out of the question.
    She left the latrine, gazed with adoration at the full moon rising just above the canyon’s rim, leaning for several moments on her stick, and felt a peace—fleeting—she had not felt in years.
    For her life, like human