My love and I are beset by our separate uncertainties, waiting on other people’s commonsense. Or whim. Or mercy. He is off to work with the healthy snacks he will forget to eat between Zoom calls, doomed to turn slimy in their Ziplock tombs. I myself am at sea.
Or rather, in the sea. Avoiding my inbox, my notebook, the daily waterboarding of the news cycle, and my own piddly efforts and aspirations that these days make up my writing life. It is unoriginal, because I think it every time, but I am never so alone as I am in the ocean, and never so tenderly held. I could slip under the waves and no one but the seals would see me go. Tell me another way to feel so alive on a weekday morning.
Murk and blackness beneath me and a sun too bright above, I rake my frigid fingers through the water and think about Colson Whitehead, who spoke last Wednesday at a Vancouver Writer’s Fest event. His humour and humility. How for an hour or so my gladness for good humans bloomed larger than my fury at the bad ones. I went with a beloved friend who recently lost her father, a man I’ve known since childhood. I had to remind myself not to let my voice crack or my eyes shine, because she didn’t need to see her sadness mirrored, she needed someone to shoulder the weight of it with her, however briefly. What a joy, then, hearing Colson make her laugh aloud. Also: his soft-spoken surety about the ineluctable choicelessness of writing; how he knew he was a writer because he couldn’t stop himself, even in the face of rejection. I kept my eyes averted from my friend so she couldn’t see the relief and gratitude welling in my eyes.
This is how swimming is like writing. I have never once emerged from the ocean sorry for going in, only sorry for the times I found excuses not to go. There are warmer options, dryer and safer ones, but show me a better place to be offline and untouchable, entirely present in the flail and kick of my own true self, than in a calm ocean bay in late September. My love, I borrowed your wet suit, so you swam too, huffing our worries away in the water.
Ashore again, my slow mile churned, I am charmed by the pink seeping so self-assuredly into the fingertips splayed open on my notebook, coaxing them back to life. Outside my window is my dog, who flew away and came back as a crow, sleek and glossy, one eye cocked for mischief. He perches on a slim branch, pecking and shifting and shuffling, eager for whatever comes next. I did try, my love, to drop our cares in the deepest part of the bay, but I sense them buoying slowly up again, the way drowned and sunken things will surface, stinking. Or I suppose, the way hope does, incredibly. Rising towards the light.