In the middle of my 37th birthday, after my windshield hits a bird in flight as I drive several miles to the deserted national park beach, I walk alone down the simple boardwalk toward the sea, while the car containing everything I planned to bring with me except for my towel, the sunscreen, and my sunglasses pulls away and drives off into the unknown. As I walk the planks, I realize one thing after another: I don’t have my water bottle. I don’t have my phone. I don’t have my wallet. I don’t have my lip balm. With each realization the sun seems brighter and harsher.
Panic begins to rise. I see myself desiccated with bleeding lips and blistered feet staggering back to the village. Other scenarios begin to swirl before I take a series of deep breaths, shed my cover-up garments and sunglasses, and march into the waves. I push myself to go farther and deeper into the waves than feels comfortable.
A perverse impulse arises to keep going. To abandon the site of perceived abandonment, as well as every other wearying and disappointing thing in life. To trust that some powerful current and my weak swimming skills will ensure a relatively swift demise.
And yet, simultaneously, I watch worry arise about being bitten by a shark. I would bleed to death on the beach alone even if I were able to wrest myself from the jaws and struggle to shore. And, even as I fantasize about being swept away by the waves, I am paranoid of every perceived strongly sucking current.
I will myself not to lick my lips. Not to swallow any sea water. Not to turn around and scan the beach for the return of my companion who drove away.
I am determined. Determined to find some meaning and enjoyment in a ribbon of moments that will continue for an unknown duration, embroidered with anxiety, rage, and a twisted thread of suicidal ideation and nervous self-preservation.
I face the horizon. I step toward it again and again. I feel the water, warmer than the air, pummel me again and again to the sand and then gently suck me toward the depths. I repeat words to myself: “trust acceptance presence.” I watch pelicans flap and swoop. I see fish jump and splash back into waves. I notice subtle changes in the cloudless sky. As I appreciate the beauty, I am simultaneously grateful for and resentful of it—beauty and wonder always tempting me away from my fatigued and hopeless death fantasies, back to life and optimistic curiosity.
I experience the present moments as a metaphor, a symbol deeply meaningful, if hackneyed. You are tiny, truly powerless in the vast flow of the whole works, a rag doll at the mercy of the ocean. At some level, always, and especially at the end, you are totally alone.
And yet you have your choices. Brace against the waves or try to flow into them? Succumb to anger and panic? How will you respond when, if, your companion returns? The sun beats down and I receive utter clarity about my place in the scheme of things, the insanity of certain active patterns, this ridiculous situation. Happy fucking birthday. This is your gift. It’s only trite because it’s virtually impossible not to get this sort of message if you are in the ocean and paying attention.
I feel emptied. Humbled. Let go of and in the process of letting go.
I recline onto the water, relax, and begin to float. Mostly. Part of me believes that something at my core is so dense and heavy that I will always begin to sink. At some point I stand up and see my companion coming down the boardwalk. He does not join me in the water but sits on the dry sand with my shed garments. I turn back to the expansive, comforting, and dangerous embrace of the ocean for what feel like long minutes before joining him, ambivalently hoping he’ll join me first.
I thank him for returning, and we talk while I bury my goose-pimpled legs in warm sand and shiver. An ocean of words can drown you as surely as the ocean, but there are no casualties in this specific sea.
Squall turns to tranquil pool and the day proceeds.
-=-=-
For a late lunch we order food that turns out to be so spicy it is painful to eat. As I masochistically masticate, determined to buck up and not waste food, I keep overhearing a mother at a nearby table threatening to hit her small blond daughter:
“Eat, or you are going to get a spanking.”
“Sit still in your chair, or you are going to get a spanking.”
“Behave, or you are going to get a spanking.”
I note the passive construction of this threat. She does not say, “…or I am going to spank you.”
Not, “I, a full grown woman, am going to strike you, a small child.”
My appetite recedes by the second.
A friendly cat jumps into a chair at our table and curls up contentedly. My companion goes inside for something. I reach out to pet the cat and as soon as I touch its fur, I am weeping with my face flat on the table.
Animals are such easy and safe companionship. No cat has ever threatened or abandoned me. I wonder: if I had been raised by a pack of feral cats, would I have simply died, or would it now be easier for me to sustain intimate human relationships?
I feel waves. Gratitude for animals. Missing my cats at home. Rage and frustration at the tenacity and trickiness of the old, deep neural wounds of abuse and how they cause me and the ones I love to enact stupid slam dances with one another when we’d really like to flow with a sense of security and ease. Impotent despair at sitting here witnessing a child’s brain being carved in just this way.
-=-=-
Not long after my companion finds me weeping face down on our lunch table, I confess to him that I had thought about suggesting a horseback ride on the beach, but I figured it would be dull and depressing after our Costa Rica horse rides where we were allowed to gallop and jump.
A few hours after this, as we pull up to the horseback ride stand, I learn that he had previously arranged for us to ride horses on the beach for an hour at dusk on my birthday.
The guide explains that he recently stopped allowing people to gallop on the beach. Too many people lied about their equestrian experience and it was dangerous to let people unfamiliar with these horses take off on them. It could be bad for business. I understand this.
If people would just be honest about things, we’d avoid a lot of trouble. Too bad we so often don’t even know how to be honest with ourselves, and that it is frequently emotionally, if not physically, unsafe to be honest.
On the ride, we learn our guide must return home immediately after our appointment to put down a sick horse. The horse is 40 years old and our guide has known him most of that time—longer than he’s known his children.
The guide does not seem sad, but he briefly snaps at my companion, who is riding the horse that the other horses do not like.
As I watch the guide ride off with the two horses we had ridden on leads behind him, I nearly began sobbing.
-=-=-
After riding, we go on the ghost walk tour, where we hear quite a bit about the difficulty of burying the dead on a barrier island. It doesn’t take much of a surge for everything to come floating back up.
I wonder what one does with a dead horse on a barrier island.
-=-=-
I don’t sleep very well that night. Things float up—symbols and metaphors can seem singularly grave and portentous in the dark of night—and I shed a lot of tears.
The next morning, the older women staying in our bed and breakfast want to know how my birthday was.
“Good.”
I hate myself for this dishonesty but it is the proper social thing, even though I’m pretty sure it’s obvious I’m lying. But it isn’t completely false.
My birthday was life. It was difficult and painful and full of mourning. And there were also: the ocean, beauty, a cat, horses, attempts at connection that were valiant if foolhardy, clarity, and peace and semblance of meaning found within it all.
Next year, I’m considering a solitary retreat in a cave somewhere for my birthday. We’ll see.
