Hello from a Melancholy Paradise
Let me preface this by saying that this has been the loveliest of lovely vacations. It's been so long since I had a beach vacation, or any vacation, really, that didn't involved working through at least some of it, or running around like a crazy person, or dealing with my family situation. This has been a rare, treasured gift, this week.
My dad used to call the Atlantic Ocean The Big Pill. It'll cure whatever ails you, he said, physical or mental. This week, we live 30 steps from the ocean. I wake up and put on a bathing suit and wander down to the beach to swim. I swim morning, noon and night. I keep going back to the ocean like an old, neglected friend.
I can't imagine ever living outside of driving distance of the ocean. Friends who grew up in the Midwest sing its praises, and sometimes I can see the appeal, but I can't imagine not being able to drive down to the ocean, to listen to its roar and contemplate the place we all came from and try to leave the worst of myself behind there. It's been too long.
This beach is not like the Jersey shore I grew up on. It's quiet, and the swells are gentle, and it's practically deserted. Southern kids return to school before Labor Day, follow a different rhythm, and we're here after peak season. The whole island is bike-able, even by me, and there are three stores and a place to rent bikes and no bars or restaurants at all. It's a quiet haven.
miss_begonia's family are as incredible as they always are. They're the kind of family that are down for sitting side by side and reading quietly for hours, or for having noisy political debates. We have put a puzzle together and watched some dumb tv and drunk some delicious margaritas while watching the sunsets. They're all amazing cooks, and we've been eating crazy good food at every meal. Miss B's mom has basically made it her mission to solve my life's dilemmas, and they are all so overwhelmingly kind, it's like a vacation all by itself just to be with them for a week or so. And, of course, Miss B has been her usual awesome self.
And yet, I dove into the ocean this morning and came up already dissolving into tears. Being at beach means having a lot of time to think. In good ways (i have written more in the last three days, not work-related, than in the last three months) and bad. Being at the beach means thinking of my family. It's where my happiest memories of my family are all centered, even if I spent a lot of time as a kid wondering how I got stuck with those people and trying to find a quiet corner to read while everyone talked about how weird I was. I'm trying not to brush everything with nostalgia.
But I think of them and how far we are from those days, and how much I miss them, and how there's no good way out that I can see of what's going on at home.
My therapist, back when I had a therapist, said part of what I am experiencing is complicated grief. I thought, All grief is complicated, isn't it? But I'm starting to see what she means. I am mourning a family that I will never have again and a place I can never get back to. My parents are still alive, but they're gone in all the ways that matter. But they're not, and I know that makes me lucky in some ways, that people would give anything to see their parents again once they've lost them, that it's not the same.
But there are no good words to explain what this feeling is like except for grief. But it's a grief without end, without closure, without rituals. It apparently makes me burst into tears on a perfect morning on a perfect vacation with people who treat me like I am one of their own.
Is this the last sad secret of adulthood? That there are no perfect moments, that every minute you are living a part of you is dying, that joy come not only after tears, but buoyed on them, in spite of them.
I think you realize, after a time, that it is hard to be an adult. But I don't think I ever realized how sad you could be, even your happiest moments.
The cure for everything, the saying goes, is salt water: hard work, tears or the sea. I hope when we leave this lovely place, I'll feel renewed by its beauty and its strange familiarity, and that the Big Pill works its magic one more time.