Mary
Through my fault.
Through my fault.
Through my most grievous fault.
The sea, it seems, has become my priest, the punishing, faceless thing to which I confess my sins, silent witness to my self-inflicted wounds. We’re alike in many ways, a restless beating of water and salt, a shifting and seething of secrets, of treacheries. Reckless. Dangerous.
The tide, you see, is a fickle thing: stealing in, sliding away, always, always turning. She comes while you’re not looking, a silent, liquid thief, only to rush away again, retreating from the shore like a coward. She gives sometimes, too, though, in fleeting, unexpected moments, yielding up her treasures and her dead—but never, ever her secrets.
And so here I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. Do not look behind you . . . lest you be swept away. That is what scripture says. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot’s wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterdays meet my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.
Oh, I’m quite aware of how ridiculous I am. I’m called Dirty Mary by the locals, though Crazy Mary would be more appropriate. I’m not dirty, but I am crazy. I have the pills and the scars to prove it. I don’t mind the name. It keeps people at a distance, which is exactly how I like them—the more distant, the better. I have no wish to share myself with anyone, you see, to unwrap either the then or the now, the before or the after. I move alone through the world. It’s better that way—safer.
There are more like me—many, in fact—who hide behind masks and write their own fairy tales. Bright or dark, it makes no difference. We would not have our true selves stripped bare, would not have cold eyes peering between our emotional blinds. Our sins and follies are ours alone, to mourn or rewrite as we choose.
I have chosen the latter.
I pay no attention to the buffeting wind, or to the sand gusting up from the dunes. Mother Nature, it seems, is bent on pitching a bit of a blow. Penny. They’re calling her Penny. High time, too, I’d say, for that good lady to show what she’s made of. We should all do that now and again, unleash a bit of ourselves—a flash of lightning, a growl of thunder—just to prove to the world and the White Coats that we haven’t been beaten, that beneath our cool, glassy surfaces we are still forces to be reckoned with.
I know about reckoning. I have lived through the reckoning.
I think of that time now, that other time, that other storm, and the day my life took its final, irrevocable turn toward disaster. I let my eyes wander briefly down the narrow strip of beach, down to Starry Point Light, hazy and chalk white in the windy distance, startled, as I always am, by how little things have changed since that awful day. And I wonder how this can be—after all that has happened, after all I have lost. It matters little now, I suppose. And so I say let the storm come, with its wind and whipping sea. Let it take what it will. For me, the sea has already done her worst.