lifeguard ovenbird We need more lifeguards. Just in general. We have lifeguards at the pool and at the beach but never in the places where the water gets really deep…like when you’ve waded out past the sandbars of your life and the earth drops away and all you can see is black and when you turn around the shore is just an idea on the horizon and you’re treading water in the cold lake of your dreams while a storm gathers. Why aren’t there lifeguards at the grocery store? So that when you’re staring into the cold face of a fridge trying to decide which eggs to buy and grief sneaks up and takes your legs out from under you someone is there to support your fractured spine. There should be lifeguards at funerals, at graduations, at birthday parties, at weddings. Someone is always going under, and we don’t even notice. We just eat our cake and ignore that aunt, or cousin, or friend who’s quietly slipping below the surface of the conversation as her thighs get tangled in the weeds that have grown up from a floundering marriage. She doesn’t even scream as the water rises to the level of her eyes. There should be lifeguards standing watch as we sleep. The subconscious is a tempestuous sea. We shouldn’t go there alone. There are rip tides out past the reefs bleached by disappointment and always the threat of rogue delta waves. So many of us hear the slosh of seawater in our lungs, and there’s no one there to force air down our throats and roll us gently to our sides as we retch everything we were forced to swallow onto the wet sand. There are no lifeguards. No one to pick my silvering hair apart from the whitecaps that roll and roll and roll me under. 260709 what's it to you? who go blather from