Emily Brisse

Because sometimes you need to think not cold but warmth. Because sometimes you need to think not dark but light. Because sometimes you need to think not fall back but spring forward . Here's an old essay, friends, that I first tapped out right here in this space that has, in the meantime, become a newish thing, a reminder that we can find a balance between two unsteady places. Visit the most recent online issue of The Fourth River , and once you open the PDF, read the other wonderful stories, essays, and poems, and then find my essay "Spring Forward," on page 96, at the very back. Thanks for reading. And believing in the transformative power of art. It is what will save us. It is what always has.

There is nothing quite like lazy days on a beach. To spend every hour of light outside--to be able to pay attention to how that light changes the color of things, and to feel it change even the color of your skin--is why people who live in the north go south for holiday. Thank you, Melaque, for your sand, your big and small waves, your mangos-on-sticks, the way everyone was looking up.

Hidden, oh hidden in the high fog the house we live in, beneath the magnetic rock, rain-, rainbow-ridden, where blood-black bromelias, lichens, owls, and the lint of the waterfalls cling, familiar, unbidden. In a dim age of water the brook sings loud from a rib cage of giant fern; vapor climbs up the thick growth effortlessly, turns back, holding them both, house and rock, in a private cloud. At night, on the roof, blind drops crawl and the ordinary brown owl gives us proof he can count: five times--always five-- he stamps and takes off after the fat frogs that, shrilling for love, clamber and mount. House, open house to the white dew and the milk-white sunrise kind to the eyes, to membership of silver fish, mouse, bookworms, big moths; with a wall for the mildew's ignorant map; darkened and tarnished by the warm touch of the warm breath, maculate, cherished; rejoice! For a later era will differ. (O difference that kills or intimidates, much of all our small shadowy life!) Without ...

Ten years ago I drove down Highway 43 at dusk, watching the sun melt into a haze of orange over Deep Lake, and with one particular song that seemed to evaporate into the heavy air on repeat, I pulled my car into his parent's driveway. He was home from California, and in that moment, shooting baskets with his brother and two friends under the garage light and an assemblage of summer-drunk bugs. He wore a yellow shirt, thin and wide on his shoulders. When his gaze met mine through the windshield glass--that smile, that shirt, that sun, those bugs, the rest of our lives: there they were. What I remember of that summer was like that look: heady. Anyone who has not just walked toward love but fallen off the dock into the black midnight waters of it will know what I mean. You do not know you can talk that long, grin that big, stare that uninterruptedly, kiss that hard, laugh that loud, dream that vividly, hope that unapologetically until suddenly you are doing all of those things, unti...