How does it feel?
We cut a wheel into the day’s blinding noon, to old, folksy tunes with raspy vocals and harmonica, strumming guitar ringing clear. The rough, leathery layers of hurt and sorrow peel slow in thin slices off our weary-teary eyes as the sun makes its highest ascent and winks and flashes sharp off the passing bogs and marshes.
To be without a home.
We drive and drive and land in an alternate universe. Sunny, bright vacation station, T-shirt stands, SUVs, overpriced seafood shacks, billowing twenty-foot rainbow-colored flags. We score a campsite at a park I remember from larger, long-ago past days and we buy a bundle of wood for a beach fire and some bread and cheese and fruit from a rustic little shop. We unpack. Pole A slides into D and F into B and our tent’s up ’n ’ at ’em and our sleeping bags are thrown in and unrolled like caterpillars.
Like a complete unknown.
We heel the short walk through piney wooded trails I remember like dreams, our flip-flops flip-flopping. The sweet musk of bayberry perfumes our path and highbush blueberries speckle the shrubs and we pick and eat. Eve startles, laughing, when an angry swallow swoops low at our heads as we pass her nest and I wrap my nets around her waist and lift her, curly hair jumping, into the salty summer air.
Like a rolling stone.
The ocean licks the shore and gulls circle and cry. Family-Jacks pack in under striped and spotted umbrellas, lounging behind glaring shades and wide-brimmed hats.
We’re quick to the water’s edge with toes dipped in the cold, clear sea and soon we’re walking our warm bellies under and swimming, gasping through the stiff current of small curling waves. Our ice-cube feet grip the sandy floor as it washes away with each coming swell and Eve curls her legs around mine and we shiver and scope a horizon-bound fishing boat. We hold fast, cheek to freezing cheek.
And you ask, How does it feel?
We sit on our towels by the feet of the rambling dunes. The sand’s massive hot on our thighs as the sun beats ultraviolet relief from the sea’s deep chill still clinging to our skin and soon we start to scat real life. She tells me about the way the Pennies and Nate make her squirm in her skin. About not eating, how thin she got, her weight in actual, legit digits. It spooks me cold.
We scat and I feel more grown-up than I know I am.
I tell her how I sometimes—but mostly used to—cut, and show her the lines on my arm as proof. I tell her about counting steps and letters and feeling so Ophelia with anxiety I think sometimes my brain might crack. I tell her I got so hooked on alters last year I almost missed the train out of happytown and Eve says it’s all okay, I’m all okay. Eve and I, we scat and scat and then fall asleep on our towels with soft, sad smiles on our word-weary lips.
We heel it back to our campsite slow, counting together the now 162 steps where it used to be 240 of my own, small wee-Jack strides.
“This was Oma’s favorite place on the planet,” I say. “This land, washed-away dunes, lighthouses moaning, houses swept away in storms.”
And our nets swing with our steps, our digits spun fast together, knuckles and palms gritty with salty dust.
And I smile. “Remember that time when I came up to you on the beach and brought you a stinking white ray and you fed me cantaloupe and I asked you if you remembered all those times?” I say and Eve, she laughs liquid silver.
“I do,” she says. “I so do.”