Sometimes when I read, the movement of my thoughts inside my head crests and rises until it becomes impossible to ignore. It feels, frequently, like a dark sea, full of secrets and stirring currents that are so hidden it would take me years to understand them. Occasionally some of these currents come to the surface with more force than others, winding and spinning, arching their spines, sinking and rising, spooling out into the blackness and pulling me to follow the ineffable paths they’ve left behind. These become the ones I am compelled to scrawl onto the page.
I am reading Sue Monk Kidd’s The Mermaid Chair. The book is an exercise in indulgence for me in so many ways – not the least being the fact that it is nearly a week late. I was at the library on Thursday, too, but I stubbornly held onto this one book, knowing in my bones that while I clearly had felt no overwhelming compulsion to get to it in a timely fashion during its loan period or any of the three subsequent renewals, the new urgency involved in it meant that I would read the book or be tormented now.
The book takes place on a coastal island in South Carolina, bringing my passionate longings for the Gulf Coast to a crashing head. It is more than simply being sick of winter, although I feel that too. It steers clear of the usual touristy descriptions of sand and surf, bright clear water and emptiness. Instead it glorifies itself in the muck: the stink of the ocean at low tide, the creatures and plants and bewildering natives who make their place by sticking to these enclaves of open water and submerged secrets like burrs. We are not the spring break dilettantes. We make our lives in marshes; we survive.
My time in Sarasota was some of the most elegant and confused that I have spent anywhere so far upon this earth. I was born there, then taken away a year into my life. When I moved back for college, I never expected to feel the kind of communion with the land that sea turtles feel on their return to their consecrated corners of the sea. I never expected that leaving would be the wrench it was. I knew simply that I would miss it, knew I would miss its sweet downtown and glowing sunsets and unapologetically sleepy sense of life.
It is a town that feels endlessly like waking up. While that time while you are still in bed is technically not producing anything of value, you still have one foot in dreams even as you turn to greet the day. Great trees rise up out of nothing; colorful characters ride by on the air. There is a very great sense of possibility that is borne, on some level, of the fact that there is nothing you could do today that has yet been ruled out.
Boston, on the other hand, feels proscribed. There are things you do here, and things you don’t. I am new here, so it’s possible I’ve misunderestimated this city, pigeonholed it as a kind of status symbol that powerful people pass through on the way to somewhere else and proper people stay in, comfortable in the knowledge that here is a place where you always know what you should do – and so does everyone else.
I knew I would have to leave Sarasota, knew that since I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life or how I was going to get to Italy, I could easily end up staying in town in unpleasant living situations, working a job I didn’t like, and cradled, but possibly smothered, by the place of my birth. I didn’t think I would be able to grow there into the person I needed to become.
What I am learning now is that I might have been able to, but the rate would have been slow, and it would only have happened if I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. My comfort zone was so large, however, that this would have been nearly impossible for me. And what motivation would I have had? Surrounded by friends, a sense of place and belonging, snug in the bosom of birthright and the sea.
I might have come to myself in a different way, a slower way. But it might have been worth it just to understand in my bones that I could do everything I needed to do without always having to remove myself from something that I loved, that productive life is possible even without the constant companionship of a fundamental, aching sense of longing.
The Mermaid Chair is a love story. While reading it I have been lying on the couch listening to Pandora, my favored station: ladyface radio. Ladyface is a snapshot of whatever is in my heart at a given time, and in an effort to keep it as accurate a mirror image as possible, I relentlessly cull and shelve songs, as well as racking my brain to think of what I’m yearning for that’s missing and adding it whenever I can. Right now it is a fabulous mishmash of indie folk, bhangra, klezmer music, old standards (Dean Martin and Sarah Vaughan featuring heavily), assorted Northern European ambient house, sweet electronic blips and bloops, and anything else that strikes my fancy.
The re-imagined tango is a relatively recent addition, and the moody, forceful, and above all restless strummings of Pavlo and Michael Richards are what shot me bolt upright to scrawl this out now. I have been sipping ice water and semi-sweet rosé from stemless wine glasses. Every time one or the other of them rises, full of delayed purpose, to meet my lips at last, I feel in their cool lapping a sadness that is endless, the itching ache of a nameless, faceless lack.
Today I received an email from a man with whom I could have built a future. I would have liked that, very much – so much that I was able to suspend my disbelief that I could care for anyone, that anyone could care for me. I was open and honest and tender to a degree that I would have found terrifying had it happened at any other time and with any other phantom from my past. And it could just be that this man was my penance for the sin of low self-esteem, because his inability to believe in what we could have built began to poison the new well of us, the one for which we had both been dowsing for so long.
Where we had once lain comfortably within each other’s arms, he began at once to cling to and retreat from me. Impassioned pleas for a partner he could trust never to hurt him again blurred into petty sniping at perceived slights and a frat boy’s cavalier, retroactive undervaluing of our intimacy – it made me feel like a whore, or worse. And yet every time I’ve thought his clear lack of sustainable interest – to say nothing of my lack of patience at the way we seem to dance around the edge of things but never dive in – have precluded a relationship, he gets back in touch with me again.
It is one of my dubious talents that I can create complexity where there is none. But as I learn to accept and embrace all my feelings, my fears and anger and desires, happiness and sadness and longing and even all my shame, things have become increasingly simple to me. One thing shines like a beacon: I am less and less able to accept people who are too tightly closed to celebrate themselves. He is someone who has always had the sense that he has a league and I am somehow out of it, and nothing I have been able to do or say has changed that fundamental insecurity that lies between us, pinioning his arms.
I have learned only recently to let my heart exist on my sleeve. It’s healthier out there, no longer caged. It is learning to respire. And one of the things I have learned in tandem is that the way to make it entirely safe and flourishing out there is to remove not only my heart, but myself, from those who might break it with their mysterious flailings. (Trying to remove one but without the other – what a perplexing and impossibly incomplete schism! Finally, finally, we are learning that we go always together.) There is a quality of innocence and wonder that I hold inside, deep, and the rest of me fights with bearlike strength at times to keep it safe. That is my spark, my little pilot light – it has been through too much to go out now on the backs of flawed relationships and the indignity of biting my tongue to keep from saying what I mean.
I am lying here in a winter that is far from the one of my discontent. It will be over soon, and rather than becoming divorced from my own happiness, I am moving closer and closer to being able to own it, to find it, to speak its own name. When I do, I think I’ll understand that large, important parts of it have been with me all this time. Today has been a day filled with lucid, floating dreams of the sweet bays and slanting sunlight of the place that gave me life and knowledge of a vast, unbroken love for me that is waiting to be claimed. I know what I am headed for. How could I pull over now for anything less?
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