“You are water, whirling water,
Yet still water trapped within,
Come, submerge yourself within us,
We who are the flowing stream.” – Rumi
The suit felt too tight, when actually, it was rather loose on his slender body.
At sixteen, Cal Prescott hadn’t quite grown into himself yet. Not long ago, he’d only measured about five feet. By age fourteen, though, he’d shot up like a weed, able to stretch an arm farther up the branches of Ojai’s tangerine trees. Lanky, blond, odd — “His voice is so peculiar,” one of his mother’s friends once remarked — he now stood almost five-ten.
Still, no matter his height, he didn’t feel sixteen.
He certainly didn’t feel like a man.
Standing in the back of a church, swimming in a black suit, listening to people talk, mumble really. Cal couldn’t hear their condolences. Or he didn’t want to.
Nothing could have his pain. No misplaced words of concern. Or prayers. The pain was his. The only thing in this life he owned. Aside from his surfboard.
He fidgeted with the stupid tie hanging from his neck. The color matched his stupid shoes. Everything was black, and he hated it.
Whenever someone tried to make eye contact, Cal looked away, finding an inconspicuous spot to observe the followers — people who believed in things Rosa had tried to instill in him for years: immortality, God, forever.
Cal’s mother would scold him later for his rotten behavior. But she seemed to be enjoying the attention. Funeral-goers fawning all over her, praising her father. Cal’s grandfather.
No one really knew E.W. — not the way Cal did.
Had.
Everett Warner. Over eighty but sharp and nimble. The only father Cal had known. His death had been sudden. Cal didn’t do well with events he couldn’t anticipate. Matters he couldn’t control. So, he controlled his emotions instead.
Cal swallowed the lump in his throat as the priest approached, a look on the man’s face Cal despised — one everyone he’d encountered today wore:
Pity.
Cal was fine. Impenetrable.
“Calvin...” The priest sighed and patted Cal on the back. “I want you to know if there’s ever anything…”
The man went on, and Cal nodded, doing things a gentleman was supposed to — manners his mother had taught him. But as he talked and talked, Cal’s mind wandered to simpler things...
The light rain dancing across the roof of the car on the ride to the service. How the drops had looked against the windows. The sky turning gloom into something beautiful. The grass on the stroll up to the doors of the church, the blades wet, sharp, like something he wanted to step through barefoot.
The ocean.
Cal thought about the ocean, its perfect waves, the silence it afforded, his surfboard.
The only sounds existing in the back of the hall now — rain and ocean.
Water.
Drowning out everything unnecessary.
Cal’s heart finally felt like it was starting to open, after days of feeling like something had been pressing on it, crushing it, sticking a knife through it.
After the priest moved on, Cal peered at his mother.
She looked so strange.
Like a stranger.
A smile on her face. A few tears in her eyes.
Emotions she’d always told Cal were bullshit.
Feelings lied.
Cal had been abandoned by his father at five. Now he feared he had no one. E.W. had left without even saying goodbye.