"Sun-Chasing"
There was racquetball and heavy sobbing in that court alone last Thanksgiving. I was angry, and with all my strength, like Zeus pitching thunderbolts, I threw my shoulder after each ball. Why do I crumble at the end of episodes when I knew I shouldn’t have hoped but did anyway? There on the wooden floor, I screamed myself hoarse before balling myself up. I wept until, aware of the echoes, I stopped, picked myself up. I went home to my ex husband who flipped past the Macy’s parade on his way to CNN or MSNBC: an unmoving appendage of the couch I stopped seeing. Skittish and unasked, he plugged himself in, so the sound wouldn’t resonate past the door I’d closed to shut him out.
This year my new boyfriend packs me into a truck. On our way to a beach house he’s rented for the weekend, he stops to buy me a tangerine bicycle. It’s cheerful next to his black cruiser. Thanksgiving day, we pedal into town and eat acai bowls, then ride along the shore with the traffic so close, each auto blows hot sand and gravel at our faces as it passes. I close my eyes, blinking long. We don’t talk much except to stop and admire the surf or reach a spot that’s too tight to share with a car. I am self-powered, gliding against the warm, my sunscreened skin absorbing it all.
There is turkey in a restaurant later, and we talk about what we’re thankful for. “I finally feel complete,” he tells me, and our eyes lock in. I look away. I don’t trust this thing, and never really have. It hurts me to say this because I feel the same as he does. I just don’t think it will last. How does one travel from a rumpled mess on a wooden floor to soaring on a tangerine bike? From a broken thing to one so whole? Can we become reborn? Is it even possible?
My defense mechanism is to instantly forget everything, good or bad, so that neither will singe my heart or set it aflame. I’m accustomed to living in the moment, do my best to absorb this sun over all else, Amen. But like an addict, I can’t just numb out the bad--the good goes, too. I wonder about how to live closer to balance, and if I dare. What if I hoped, what if I reminisced, rather than selectively remembering bipolar instances or laughing out when he calls me as his future wife, like a joke.
He is surfing now. From the window, I watch him cut up and down the faces of waves, the white wash chasing him from behind. Lithe and graceful, I notice he rarely turns back. But his memory is impeccable and he talks easily about having more together. I love him and know I could love him more by truly letting him in. It worries me though; how does one love fully without losing the self?
Suddenly, I am an impostor, unable to keep my shatteredness sheathed when a Christmas song plays on the radio; my reticent tears disobey my command to “stop!” Everything closes in on me again--the anniversary of my dead father, the anniversary of my divorce. The way I slayed myself both times for the sake of those men, my private sobs finally rampant, running freely for the woman I was, I am, and perhaps will be forever.
It takes so much courage to let go and be free. And I don’t know if I have enough, having squandered so much already. What if I had faced an entire year alone, like I vowed to do this time last year? Would I feel less or more like giving up on everything? I wish to be gliding again, next to that shore slammed by ten-foot waves, the dusky sea splash burned off by the winter rays. I wish to be silent again, my face smooched between the canopies along that path. Where Christmas didn’t matter, where anniversaries were remote, where there was nowhere to hide from the sun.
