The loch has changed in the twenty years since I last saw her up close. Her grassy edges have shimmied their skirts around, creating inviting new rivets, the old ones worn down or grown over, like healing scars. I look down at my own body in its tankini. I too have been sculpted and reformed over time, my edges rounder and new foliage sprouted. Grey clouds gather their shawls and gossip around the sun, the sticky summer sky whisks away a postcard perfect moment.
I skim stones across the water, watching them bounce as though on a tight drum skin. I wonder if the jagged rocks have touched my feet before; I sift through pebbles that were once boulders, as though looking for a familiar face.
The rocks beneath my feet turn squelchy, slippy with their moss and wet kisses as I introduce myself to the loch once more. She scoops me up like a ladle, her slick black body like an orca, I become the white blob of her beady eye.
I imagine the undiscovered prehistoric beasties residing in her depths, giant fish camouflaged by mud that like to scratch their itchy bellies across the silt below. I look down at my legs just a few inches below the water; they are the colour of stout. I try to catch the earthy bath water but as I lift my hand the colour slips away like a chased shadow.
The whirling currents of the loch embroil me in a ceilidh, I don't remember her succubine tethers pulling me in this deep before, no matter how loud she called for me. The water gets colder the further I go, I can feel the marrow of her bones claiming me as her own. My breath catches in my chest as I turn back and see the shrunken shoreline. It is the sliver of a crescent moon, a thin arc between my past life and new.
My hair turns to reeds, and I begin to choke as shards of memories spill from my throat slicing through the sinew, forming gills. I let them go as my hands become webbed. Water flows through me and over me and I weave through her as gracefully as an otter. We hold each other excitedly, like lovers at a train station; we spin, interlocked like yin and yang, singing in bubbling spirals.
We slow dance as I make my way back to the shore, her grip is lighter, warmth rests in her shallow borders. I swim until my body is bobbing above the water and my belly scrapes against the ground. Cast out like flotsam, her grip wavers, like a ribbon freed in a breeze. I splat like seaweed on the banks and she laps at my feet with puppy licks. A dragonfly kisses my cheek, a cleg tries to feast on my washed up carcass. I can smell the crab apple trees and wet lycra. The sun peeks around the curtain, illuminating the moment where I return to human form and my breath remembers my lungs.
I cannot say goodbye though it is time to leave, a teardrop has no place in her freshwater frame. A blown kiss flutters over her ripples, a cricket answers back with a jig. The loch sighs, her bile spits a rusty tin can to shore, but soon she will forget me and busy herself once more in becoming. I feel her loving sway long after I have washed her earthy dregs from my hair, and the sun oozes down between the stocking tops of the hills.