The Gods Have Their Reasons
THE GODS HAVE THEIR REASONS
Who knows what leads her to these drunken trips to the ocean. Guzzling beer and bourbon, a cigarette in one hand and a bottle in the other. How the hell does she even hold the wheel?
It always starts with this Romantic idea of her return to the sea. She is going home dammit. She listens to bad mixtapes on her shit car stereo singing along to all the sad songs.
When The Smiths come out with “I Know It’s Over”, it becomes her mantra. Except she replaces soil with ocean.
Oh mother, I can feel the soil ocean falling over my head
And as I climb into an empty bed
Oh well, enough said
I know it's over, still I cling
I don't know where else I can go, oh
Oh mother, I can feel the soil ocean falling over my head
See, the sea wants to take me
The knife wants to slit me
Do you think you can help me?
She really does believe the ocean wants to take her. She seethes. A submerged volanco. Erupting every day. Boiling her life into black and red lava. Her life becomes a burn victim. She the one who is terrified of burn victims.
Maybe she drives to the ocean to put the fire out.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembers the impact Kate Chopin’s AWAKENING had on her when she read it and was just nineteen years old. The main character Edna escapes the trap of her life by walking into the Gulf of Mexico and drowning herself. The young woman recalls the story and is confused about whether this is a story of triumph or defeat or both.
She drives to the ocean, walks in fully clothed, gets dragged to the shore in a nest of kelp. Lives.
Maybe she goes on these missions to find the dead body of her aunt who drowned in the ocean, high on downers and despair. Maybe they are multiple acts of discovery and reclamation. Near death as a way of keeping one foot on the shore of life. So many maybes . . .
But on these pilgrimages to the ocean, often taking over two hours with a lot of stops to piss on the side of the road and find open liquor stores for booze and cigarettes, the young woman believes she is going home. And home in these stages means dying in the place she loves most. The ocean.
So she does this. Over and over.
And I know it's over, still I cling
I don't know where else I can go
Over and over and over and over
Over and over
One night she drags a friend with her. The friend thinks they are taking a fun drive to the ocean to watch the full moon and doesn’t understand that she is coming along to pay witness to a suicide mission.
They drive to Half Moon Bay through fog and rain. The Toyota veers into the parking lot, and the two young women run rebellious across the stormy beach. They drink champagne straight from the bottle. This is a celebration dammit. A living eulogy in drunken dance. Then in a flash the young woman who never was a girl, makes a beeline for the crashing waves and walks straight into them.
The undertow is powerful, wraps its long fingers around her ankles and pulls her out. Her jeans cling to her legs heavy with ocean water. As if she is made of cold concrete slabs. She sinks under, is ready to accept this eternal embrace when her friend rushes in after her and pulls her out.
“WHAT THE FUCK?”
Embarrassment and shame. These are regulars. Things that drive the young woman who was never a girl to the ocean and the bottle in the first place.
Sometimes when she doesn’t have the gumption to drive to the ocean, she goes to the graveyard, lies on her brother’s grave and waits for the sprinklers to come on in dawn. In a drug-dazed dream, she watches the sprinklers spin in waves, pulling her in, pulling her away. They are water wings that will fly her away. Except they don’t.
Eventually the security guard kicks her out of the cemetery, and the young woman who was never a girl drives home and passes out with her mouth feeling like it’s stuffed with her dead brother’s dirty socks.
Other nights she drives herself to the ocean, walks out to the sea, feels the ice cold embrace, but somehow it always chucks her back to the sand.
On a sober night (because these do happen), she decides to do some research to learn more about who won’t let her die in the ocean. She tries to discover who keeps throwing her back to life. Oceanus is the son of chaos. You’d think he’d embrace her. She is a chaos addict. Chaos lover. She breathes chaos even when she is trying to stop herself from breathing. Oceanus should want her! But he doesn’t.
Poseidon is the god of Oceans and also god of rivers, storms, flood and drought, earthquakes, and horses. Well holy shit, yeah she is Chaos. But she also knows damn well that she is river, storm, flood, drought, and earthquake. So perhaps the horses that keep kicking her out of the ocean. It must be the horses.
One night she wakes to the blinding light of a flashlight. A cop. He questions her. Somehow she convinces him that what she needs is a blanket, a warm place, and someone to care for her. The cop scoops her up and puts her in the backseat. Tells her it will be okay.
She wakes in the morning with a mouthful of sand. Face down on the beach. Her legs slashed from the tumult of rocks and waves. No cop in sight.
She must have dreamed of her biological father who left her when she was two and is currently drinking himself to death in Las Vegas. He will in fact die one month after this night on the beach. Maybe she has been mirroring him because mirroring him was the only way she could be close to him.
She spends an inordinate amount of her drunk and sober time trying to understand these kinds of complex relationships to herself and her world. She never comes up with solutions, so ultimately she eventually just drives back to the ocean for another dive toward death.
Until her father dies. When the man whose sister drown herself in the ocean kicks the bucket with a poison liver, the woman who was never a girl stops driving herself to the ocean to die and starts going there to live.
Eventually she has a daughter of her own who she takes to the ocean. The suicide years are far behind her. She and her daughter body surf side by side, riding waves, smiling, laughing and screaming with the thrill.
In this moment when she looks at her daughter and sees her young face beaming with possibility, joy and ocean spray, the young woman who was never a girl realizes that this is why the ocean kept kicking her out. The gods have their reasons.
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