I had one mission on my summer trip to Miami: numb my mind in warm waves. With other tourists, I boarded the boat, the only single traveller with groups of families and two older couples. The captain warned us that today the waves would be bumpy. Since I had gotten seasick many times in the past, I braced myself as the boat crashed after it climbed each wave.
As the others put on masks and fins, waddled to the edge, jumped in, I hesitated, but when they weren’t sucked under to never return, I figured it was safe and made my way down the metal ladder, my fins slapping churning water.
At first, the cool shock made me draw my breath in, but as I plunged my face against the waves’ window, my body’s warmth, its presence, its fact, its insulation began to assure me. I could just float here, look down, roll with each wave, occasionally look up to make sure I wasn’t too far from the boat, and not get sick. I could dip my eye mask into endless water, make my mask a glass pane to see into a world I never really knew existed. Intellectually, I knew there were oceans and that there were fish in them, but I didn’t feel that life, didn’t absorb what it had to teach me.
Sea grass undulating in huge waves, purple sea fans pulsing with ridges on their tips, palm-sized striped blue and green fish, a thumb-sized neon blue and brilliant orange fish, a coral’s thin fingers combing my hair. Submersed. Tangled with life not my own. This is the forgetting and remembering that I had been aiming for.
Five years of verbal abuse spiked with flashes of physical abuse, like a profusing bloody nose had ended. I had left my ex’s ranch surrounded by nine acres of once charred forest and pasture, left his three dogs that I had lived with, walked with, fed and loved as if they were my own, left 150 chickens, two guinea pigs, and most of my belongings in his small 450 square foot cabin.
I finished teaching two online courses at my sister’s house in a South Bay suburb three hours from his ranch in the foothills, cried every day at random intervals, and nursed a little too much white wine a few times as I finally told her about the bloody nose, glasses of water to my face, pitched empty water jugs, how I was pushed against the couch, how I still loved him, but why.
What was wrong with me?
My big sister kept telling me, “You can’t go back. It will just keep getting worse.” And “You need to think about why you love someone who treats you like this.” Why? We had a chemical pull, like we were two electrons attracted together for hot sex that would take us to the highest realm of existence, yet would, in a matter of weeks, implode and destroy, again and again.
I had to break addiction’s chain. Like I had given up smoking a pack a day when I was plagued with chronic bronchitis for years, I needed to reprogram my body, ignore its cravings for something that hurt it.
I had to expel my body’s urge to pair with his.
I had to throw the beyond-reason need to feel his body in mine.
If I didn’t, according to my sister, “I might be killed.”
“The abuse always gets worse each time you go back. You know that.”
My mind knew it. My body had other ideas.
My sister, her two kids, and my parents were planning to meet up in DC in 10 days, the city we had grown up near but hadn’t been to in over twenty years, so I looked for plane tickets I could afford that would be in DC’s general direction from California and let me be in large waves that would cast my body up and down, twirl it, hopefully spin it until it was purged.
That first night, I took a Lyft to the hotel that was one of those contactless spots that began to pop up during Covid. In 2022, we were mostly beyond the Pandemic, but threads that would forever change our lives had taken root. This seemed oddly fitting for what I was aiming to do. I dropped my bags off, put on my swimsuit, and walked three blocks to the beach.
Humid, briny air wrapped around my body as I passed art deco buildings with red and blue painted features set against white stucco and wind-lifted palm tree strands. Deep breaths, sweet ocean smells, sounds of kids chasing each other in the sand and building castles they know will be gone in a few hours.
I thought about how everything we build falls to time’s waves, but we still sculpt walls with sand and water. As I slowly walked into throbbing waves, first ankles, then calves, then mid-waist that he held in lovemaking, then belly, chest, neck, mouth that his lips once met, nose, and, under now, the head which has spent too much time thinking about him, my body unhinged from what it thought it wanted and let itself be carried by waves’ movement, their knowledge. Lifted, lifted, dropped, dropped, pulled this way, then that. If I could just let go, let the waves take me, maybe I could find myself again.
The waves knew what I needed to do.
I signed up for a two-hour snorkelling tour in Key Largo.
As I let waves’ knowledge turn me left and right, move me above coral glimmering with sunlight, over fish schools of amber yellow and flame red and white and blue strips, over lobsters with tentacles reaching into water like it was air, my ignorance of the ocean and this other world hit me.
How had I gone through 47 years not feeling what the ocean had to teach me? How had I forgotten the connection I felt as a child as my body surfed small waves off Bethany Beach in Delaware? How could I shape my life to explore this new world, witness, watch, pay attention to it, not try to shape or bend it into my human world? How could I come in contact with it again and again, plunge my body to tap its knowledge?
We went to two more spots. As long as we were snorkelling or the boat was moving, my sickness was at bay. But if we stopped for too long before jumping in the water or waited too long for the snorkelers who were lingering in the water, the waves moved too fast, threw our boat up and down, and brought on my nausea.
Throughout the trip, I sat next to a family from Athens, Georgia. The mom was also getting sick, so we talked to each other through the boat’s idle moments.
I told her of how, when I was twenty, I had gone on a road trip by myself on spring break from college, drove around Georgia into Alabama, stopped in Athens for the night, about how the moss draped down from seemingly ancient trees calmed my young and nervous self. She told me about their five-acre property outside of the town, how they raise chickens and have too much grass to mow.
After the last stop, I had chunks of seaweed tangled in my long hair because I let it stream behind my body when we were in the water. As the boat crashed into waves on its way back to the mangrove-surrounded land, I pulled and pulled, trying to untether the ocean’s grass from my curly hair. The woman told me to come closer and let her help. Her agile fingers plucked each fragment from my hair without ripping my thick threads. Her care, her tenderness to me, a complete stranger, struck me as a new way to be in the world. In this new world, kindness from a stranger could surprise me and make my day. Maybe I could do the same for others.
Maybe I knew nothing about this world that I had been living in for over four decades. My ignorance hit me with a kind of bliss. There are whole realities I haven’t explored, so many places and countries that I have yet to visit and learn from, so many people who aren’t like my ex, whom I have yet to know.
What made me think I knew anything before? I should be like a baby feeling the surfaces of things to begin to know again their circumfrances, their textures, their promises, never tire of seeing new things, exploring new places, beginning to know the world again from nothing.
Over the next three years, I became addicted to the positive feeling of immersing my body in waves, looking down into waters I had never seen before, paying attention to fin movements and how lobsters blended with the rocks they inhabited. I let my body be cleansed by waters. I discovered a world I was and would forever be ignorant of.
