Free The Visible World by Mark Slouka

down the shore. Years later, remembering our summers there, I returned alone.
    There was a sort of softening that occurred to people there, an involuntary easing of something very much like pain. I don’t know what it was about the place exactly. Perhaps it was the sun, or the water, always busy with some kind of invisible midges, or the strange pleasure of seeing the dark prints of their bodies evaporating off the wooden dock. More likely, for people who measured everything by its similarity to the world they’d known before, it was that it was so close to the original they’d lost—a reasonable facsimile.
    And yet it was this very closeness, which invited the heart to play, and which would find them staring at a line of light slanting through the leaves, or watching their own white feet sweep back and forth through the water...it was this very familiarity that brought out every difference like a thorn, that made the place more excruciating than New York City could ever be. It was so close, this small pond with its screen-door
chatas
smelling of cedar and smoke, and yet...the birds sounded different here, and the water was warmer than it should have been, and the air did not smell of chamomile and pine and moldering loam and
hříbky
with caps of dirt on their velvety heads, but of other things.
    Of course, even if everything had been precisely the same, it wouldn’t have helped. Nothing could match what they’d had, for the simple reason that they couldn’t have it again. It was not that what they’d lost had been better or more beautiful than what they’d found here, just that it had been theirs, and it had been lost. Not even the war had done that. They could no more substitute for it than a mother or father could substitute for a lost child by adopting another who shared the same features or spoke in the same voice. And yet, though they knew this, they couldn’t help being drawn to that other, newer child, listening to it, running a hand over its hair.
    Even my father, who at best tolerated this kind of sentimentality, was not immune. In the mornings I would find him sitting on a chair he’d carried out to the shore, tracing the corners of his mouth with his fingers like a man smoothing a mustache, the slow waves of light from the water moving up his shirt.
    “It’s not that I don’t understand,” he said to me once.
    I’d sat down in the grass next to him. My parents had had an argument the night before over some movie I didn’t know, and my mother had gone into the little wooden bedroom next to mine and slammed the door.
    He waved his hand to indicate the black water, the trees, the last slips of mist being dragged up into the bluing sky. “I do,” he said. “It’s just that it does no good.”
     
    I didn’t miss the city, particularly. I missed driving in on summer mornings, when a kind of bruise-colored fog obscured the buildings and only the tallest skyscrapers rose above it, flashing their sides one after the other like great, silver-scaled fish, and I missed the coconut custard pie and milk my mother would buy for me at the Chock Full o’ Nuts with its clean, curving counters, and the
obst-torte
with the glazed strawberries we would share at the German pastry shop on Second Avenue. But that was all, really. Our friends still visited us at the lake in the summers, and my father still brought home Irish soda bread in white paper bags as he always had, and though I missed my room in the apartment on 63rd Road, what I really missed, I see now, was not the room itself but the feeling of being a child there. For a while after we moved I would wake up in the dark and think I was still there, and that the door to the hall was behind me rather than to the left, and it would take me a few moments to move things around, so to speak, to reconcile where I was with where I’d been.
    A year after we moved to our house in the suburbs I dreamed that I was walking through our old apartment. It was dark and