I woke up underwater.
The first fact was the cold. The second was the dark. The third was the roof of my own car, inches from my face, and the river filling the cabin as if it had been waiting for me.
I do not remember driving off the road. I remember the night before in pieces — the powder, the highway, the job I was supposed to be good at, the secret I had been carrying so long it felt like a second spine. And then nothing. And then this: a window that would not roll down, a door that would not open, and a thought as clear as a bell.
You can die here.
I did not want to die. That was the surprise. After years of treating my life as something I could spend, I found out, in a river in Massachusetts, that I wanted to keep it.
I got out. I do not know how. I stood on the bank in the dark with river water coming off me and understood, without poetry and without ceremony, that the next choice I made would have to be a different kind of choice.
A few weeks later an old friend wrote to me about a vine in the Amazon. I had read the name years before and forgotten it. I bought a ticket. I did not yet know the names of the people who would meet me, or the language of the songs I would hear, or that a local curandero named don Juan would look at me as if he had been expecting a stranger from a river.
I only knew I was still alive, and that alive would have to mean something now.