Save Me
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The Poem
Save Me
I know this place.The heart rate drops before I can explain it —before the mind catches up to what the body already knows:this is home.
It is made of everything.Not painted — lived in.The blue of a thousand sunny Tuesdays,the gold of late afternoons when the beach empties slowlyand the last light falls on the rampand the tower stands there in the quiet of a structurethat has done its work and is still watching —because watching is not a shift you clock out of.
Still watching
It is a condition. A permanent orientation toward the waterand the people in itand the moment before the moment when someone needs saving.
I wonder about its loneliness.Standing through the winter. The blanket days.The storms that came without asking.The off-season quiet when the beach belongs to no oneand the tower watches anyway —the loneliness of the carer between the caring.
Present. Patient. Still facing the water even when no one is in it.
The golden figures descend every summer.The physicality of people who trained to swim into the rough water —the body offered as argument against the current,the arms as counter-proposal to the wave.This is not a small thing.
The junior lifeguards come every yearin their red suits and their ambitionnot yet seasoned by the knowing of what it actually costs —training for the day they earn the right to climb the ramp,to sit in the tower, to be the one who watches.
Climb the ramp
The station receives them the way it receives everything —without ceremony, with the patient welcomeof a structure built to hold whoever needs holding up.
First loves. First summers. Lost summers.A winter day, a big blanket, the water grey and coldand the tower standing the way it always stands —blue, patient, watching.
My heart rate drops when I see one.The body knowing before the mind —that this place means:someone is watching. Someone is in the tower.Go ahead and swim. I’ve got you.
Save me.Not from the water.From the feeling that no one is watching,that no one will notice,that the current is stronger than anyone on shore can see —the station says:someone always notices.
The water is watched.
You are watched.
Go ahead.
Swim.