I spend two weeks at the beach and in that time my lifelong suspicion towards the water tightens into a ball of wiry dislike. Gummy in my mouth, spat onto the cement. Yes, the ocean is like a metal plate, like my grandmother’s left eye, like a bubble bath. Yes, the ocean is like a washing machine, like darkest romance, like a parking lot reflected back. A typically ugly girl, I despise its effortless beauty with all my might. I cling to the surfboard, saltwater gurgling powerfully around my feet and legs. I appeal, a little panicked, to Poseidon’s better nature. A typically insecure girl, my immediate reaction to danger is to placate the aggressor. I say: This is unnecessary. To destroy me, you only need to grow old with me. The waves meet me where I am and respond, cheerfully, with all the straightforwardness of the truly self-assured: Never. This is a place you do not belong. This is not a place where you will be wanted and loved. Come out further than waist deep and see.
I meet a man in a hotel lobby and within an hour, he is telling me things I don’t think even his wife knows. I sit and blink empathetically. You might think this is some sort of layered feminist statement but it isn’t, I have always understood this role and I play it with equal gusto for both men and women, but it’s mostly men that really need it. I’m convinced that the rabid dogs on the beach are angels fallen from heaven. They race into the embrace of the waves and defecate onto the warm sand. They open their mouths and because no blessings come out, they must bite instead, but I know it is all a misunderstanding. I just have that kind of face, the kind you want to say things to. I know it when I see the foamy, omen-studded fangs. For a scintillating, shit-stained second, I am ready to let the world go in a flood of blood.
Facing this, I think, unoriginally: It doesn’t matter and it never mattered. It doesn’t matter how pretty you are, how quick-witted. It doesn’t matter how many men you comforted from across the table. It doesn’t matter how many times you told a lie, how many times you hurt a child, how many times you chose right, whether deliberately or inadvertently. It is only the teeth and then the water that will decide the life you have left. For this alone, I have sworn to always hate seventy percent of the Earth. I tell myself that this is not fear, that it is honest risk assessment. But if I only learn the difference ex post facto, did I ever?
Notice how I used “ex post facto”? Am I cool or what? Notice how I called myself both ugly and pretty in separate paragraphs, as though trying to split the difference between humility and confidence? Do I want to eat my cake and have it too or what? Notice how I’m doing a weird fourth wall break here, as though to speak directly to you, yes, to you? Yes, yes, you, you?
I come back after two weeks to practice and when I half-bow through the door after the flight of stairs, I am shocked to see the relief on Alvin’s face. Tossing and turning in the night, I’d told myself he would not notice I was gone. Tossing and turning in the current, I’d told myself he didn’t care enough to notice. In the long summer of the opening door, I finally catch that wave. The water surges and pulls me in, but I wash up on the sand, greenish spit across my smile, sparkling foam on all my limbs. In the end, as always, the only one I was fooling across the table was myself. I wake up at four in the morning again, after fourteen days of perfect sleep, and I think, yes, there it is. I was never where I went. I was always here, embedded in a glittering lucky prism I do not deserve and cannot really understand, but where I am wanted, yes, where I am wanted.