No More Oceans

Sep 29, 2009 02:00

I've had this on my computer for forever, but I've always felt weird about posting it. Apparently, gay porn? No problem! Semi-respectable original prose? Hide it! Neverletitseethelightofday! It helps that I am aided, at the moment, by the liquid courage of alcoholic Shirley Temples, which are, in case you've never had one, dangerously tasty. Particularly with strawberry vodka. Anyway... This is in no way autobiographical, just kind of weird.


When I was little, my dad didn’t tell me things. I don’t mean he forgot, I mean he intentionally omitted certain facts when he was forming my picture of the world.

My dad never told me about the ocean, so the first time he took me to the beach, he covered my eyes with his huge, calloused hand and carried me down to the shore. I could hear this roaring sound, like a hairdryer, but sloshing and everywhere. When we got to the water’s edge, he made me close my eyes while he put me down. I felt the wet sand between my toes, but the second the waves crept up on me, I was so startled I jumped back and opened my eyes, and there was water all the way to the horizon, with the sun floating at the edge, about to fall off. I screamed and fell down, and the waves hollowed out the sand around me. My dad laughed and told me not to get sand in my hair, but I could barely hear him for all the noise. At first, I thought the water was swallowing up the world, that there were a finite number of rain clouds and they’d all piled up in one place for too long, and now there was all this water with nowhere to go. But my dad didn’t look worried. He just sat down beside me and stared out at the sunset, like he’d never seen an ocean before either.

And I was always glad he did it that way, because how many other kids remember the first time they saw the ocean? Maybe you remember your first trip to the beach, or your first sunburn, but that moment, when you open your eyes and it looks like you’re standing at the edge of the world, and you feel like you’ve discovered it, that’s something I have because of him.

There were other things along the way. Elephants were a big surprise, and the first time I saw a helicopter I cried for half an hour. But eventually I got older and went to school, and there were other kids around to tell me about spaceships and sex and what bullets are for. My dad ran out of surprises, but I never stopped waiting. Even when I was a teenager, in the back of my head I still expected him to come into my room one day and tell me to take his hand and close my eyes. He never did, but I was always ready for it. I’d think about everything there could be left to find out, like the world around me was just a painted curtain, and behind it there were fantastic, terrifying, confusing things that I’d discover one day, and then everything would be different. In some ways, I was right, and every first kiss, first fist-fight, first car crash felt like peeking behind the curtain on my own, while my dad sat back and watched, worried and happy.

When I was twenty-three, he died. I stood ankle-deep in sinking, wet earth while they lowered the casket, and my relatives cried, but all I could think about was what he hadn’t had time to tell me. What if our family had been entrusted with an ancient secret, and all the other surprises were just to tests? What if when he went travelling after college, he met Amazon warriors and they showed him temples built by aliens? What if there was nothing left behind the curtain, and he hadn't had the chance to mention it?

That night, I ransacked his house, dumping out drawers, opening shoeboxes silver-gray with dust, desperate and determined that there had to be one more thing, a clue somewhere. I read love letters from my mom, dead for longer than I could remember, and love letters from women with names I’d never heard him mention. I went through old bank statements, tax returns, planners ten years out of date, searching for some discrepancy, a slit in the curtain that I could use as a fingerhold to tear it apart.

At dawn, I sat on the couch and cried, hunched over, shaking with rage and grief. I cried for the secrets he might not have told me, and for the things I hadn’t told him, like how much I loved the sound of waves breaking on the sand. Mostly, I was scared to death that this was all there was, all there’d ever be, just student loans and water stains and dead fathers, no more elephants, no more first-loves to be had or surprises big enough to shake my world apart and put it back together, marvelous and new. I cried because there were no more oceans.

non-fanfic, pg

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