pitching forward

The ocean was one of my first loves. Before I discovered the internet, before everything, my family always received these magazines that I don’t remember the names of anymore. I’m sure Nat Geo would be one of them. I would lose myself in the deep sea stories and imagine how it’d feel to be an orca (back when everyone thought there was only one species) to swim freely across this vast, undiscovered world. I watched Steve Irwin with my parents and my brother when I had my first stomach ache. When YouTube was discovered, I would play ocean videos. My best dreams always took place in the sea.

When I was still a swimmer and spent hours in the pool every day, I used to sink to the bottom of the water and look up. I would look into the blue lit up by florescent lights, reflections rippling outwards and bubbles floating upwards, and imagine how it would feel to stay there forever. I would lay there for as long as my lungs would allow, waiting until my hands went numb before breaking surface again. I loved that muffled, echoing silence 14 feet deep. On land, I was always afraid of something. My arms were too long and my joints would hurt from running — I felt like a clumsy, stupid joke. A dead thing walking, a sense of predation and prey. Underwater, I didn’t need to speak. If I closed my eyes, I could see clouds of African cichlids and tide pools filled with nudibranchs and scrambling crabs.

The panacea of languishing in the most three-dimensional space, expanded and expansive beyond compare. A swelling, of peacefulness, of being whole. You would feel it in a good pool. Not a warm pool, not a slippery pool, not a warm-up pool. A good pool was deep, cold, therapeutic, and as you swam, you could feel your body cutting through the water with all spare bits shorn away. I could never be hurt here. I never have.

To know that your body would beckon any shape so long as you had breath within it. I could go away, look up at the sun fragmented through the ripples, and feel so wonderful and contained. That’s how I imagine orcas to live. Or, imagine the manta rays following the warm jets across the largest oceans on the planet, playing all the way. Or, imagine the path of the salmon, feeding and carving out the history of so many humans; bringing the sea’s gifts back to trees and animals and land through their carcasses. Species that change sex, bioluminescent squid that have made a pact with bacteria millennia ago — even the bacteria can glow collectively in a quorum — how could we ever compare? Give me that sort of divinity.

When I was in college, I used to have a creeping thought of a fish hook dipping into my navel and smoothly taking everything out, the fat and bloated guts falling out of me like a spread eagle. It is my terrible thing, an idle thing, a recurring thought that I’ve found incapable of banishing completely. I’ve never found something that could replace this meditation, the Buddhist dissolution of self. I existed too much. This entire winter, I have waited for time to seize control of my life again.

Yes, I think that’s it — I have been waiting, all this time, to enter the littoral zone of my own life. I want to be transformed, a dead thing on the ground, into something that belongs to the path in the patterns of the ocean. I don’t want to poke around in these rotting bits out of morbid curiosity anymore. My mind only pulls in certain things — a stanza written in the past so long ago I’m not sure whose skeleton I’m speaking over. A purloined identity. I’m still stuck at 16 years old. Ever since then, I’ve just been watching myself in abject horror as my body moves away from me, talking through a louse that’s replaced my tongue.

How else to identify this white-shelled loneliness, blighted silence, and other such horrors of my own making? It really is turtles all the way down. My stupid, raving heart, pumping furiously inside a rib cage that does not work. All alone, there’s nothing but who I was as a child as my north star desperately looking for something to hold all the parts of me together. All this time, trying not to be alone. Even so, I have kept on crawling on.

I’ve stood on the edge of Point Reyes, a hyphenate to the endless water, looking down on the waves cutting a coarse line to land beyond where my eyes could see. I’ve been within the golden glow of the Amazon rainforest, listening to the river lap against innumerable, fascinating birdcalls, in a small motorboat prying its way through dark water and weeds. Felt my toes dig into the sand of Newport Beach at night, always a little scared of the sand fleas an inch below. 40 feet under the Pacific Ocean, catching glimpses of sharks in between rocks and reefs. San Diego’s phosphorescent algae against the night sky as waves crash, neon blue flashes mirroring the blinking stars. Floated above reef mantas feeding and spinning in circles with a delightful grace. What gods are these, small and large alike? The water sings a song, if you listen close enough. That’s the point, I guess. Emptiness and holiness. That’s it.