Falling Water (A Chapter from “You are Here” by j.g. siminski)
When he was younger, in his twenties, the forty-five minute drive to the ocean was never given a thought. He did it almost every Saturday in the summer months and would spend hours on the beach, perhaps reading, but mostly just watching the people, the bodies more precisely, of those that appealed to his sexual appetite. But it wasn’t just that, it was searching for someone that would take away the loneliness that plagued him since he was a small boy. It was a wound that wouldn’t heal, leaving him in an endless longing so desperate that it was beyond difficult for him to concentrate on much anything else. And in one way, he was lucky; he was smart enough to get by in just about anything he did, but his loneliness stopped him from really succeeding at the thing he would be doing at any given time. A job was rarely a career. It was a means to an end and it swallowed up hours that he would otherwise have spent in loneliness.
It was forty years on now and the ocean was flat and grey and the beach was deserted. The chill in the damp air felt right. The vacant beach felt right. The sand supported those feelings in him. The millions and millions of grains, like he himself, like the people in the world, only seemed to mean something as one big whole. He knew he was only significant in that way as one grain of sand.
He was never that crazy about the ocean. Sometimes he liked looking at it, but he couldn’t swim so if it brought up any emotion in him, it was mostly fear. He did really love looking out at the sea in a storm and he loved the beaches of Cape Cod and the wind-bent wooden fences that meandered along the sand and beach grass. When he thinks of it now, it reminds him of happier days of his youth, when his brother was still alive, and his sister, and his parents.
His sister, Veronica, was much older than him. In fact, if she had been just a few years older, she would have been old enough to be Dominic’s mother, the age spread among the siblings was that great. It was when Dominic was about eight that early one summer morning she asked him if he would like to drive over into Canada and spend the day at the beach. So they set out with Veronica’s boyfriend, Hugh, and made their way across the Peace Bridge on that warm and humid, overcast Saturday. Even so, Hugh had the top down on his baby blue, Rambler 440 convertible. On Saturday mornings in the summer months, young people would gather on the beach in their cars as the main attraction was that you could drive right onto the mostly hard lakeshore sand. It was thrilling for Dominic to see all these shiny cars out on the foggy beach.
More than anything it was the lasting memory of seeing his sister smiling and confident in her being, the way she perceived the world around her, the relaxed way in which she flicked her hair back over her shoulder. In his mind now, it was like looking at a Super 8 movie clip, foggy like the beach that day, ethereal and muted around the edges. As he beheld the gray beach before him today, other memories came rushing in like the cresting waves before him; rushing in and then ebbing away.
Throughout his early youth he remembered pool days with one of his older brothers, the one closest to him in age. Michael loved climbing up the high diving board and jumping in. He had been learning how to dive and in keeping with the innate sense of perfection he carried, Dominic watched in awe as his brother placed on his nose clip and then thrust himself into the air with the grace of a diving swan. He remembered the smell of the lilacs that surrounded their park pool and the smell of suntan lotion on fresh young skin, all gone now to decades-old memories, that can no longer be shared, but only imagined by those who weren’t there. He thought about how often he heard people say today, “at our age one gets used to people dying,” but he got used to it when he was only a child. It was always there, walking hand in hand with life.
Dominic unsnapped the large outer pocket on his loose denim coat and pulled out the plastic bag with baby’s ashes in it. The decision to spread her ashes had taken him more than a decade. He loved all his cats, but baby was unique and stirred at his soul like a sage. She had lived 18 years and had saved him from death even after she was physically gone.
He looked at the ashes through the clear plastic and could feel through it with his fingers larger, harder bits that he imagined were bits of bone. It reminded him in some odd way of how small she was for a cat and of her ragged voice, which made her meow sound like she was the cub of a mountain lion. He remembered the first time he saw her at the weekend pet adoption at the local pet store, how she was off from the other cats, but when she saw him she made a raspy cry in his direction and pushed her tiny paw between the wires of the cage and tried to touch him. She was so, so tiny.
Some years ago, about a year after her death, Dominic had become seriously ill and as things go sometimes, he didn’t realize that with each passing hour he was moving precipitously closer to death. He was quite aware that he was sick, but it was so sudden, his mind wasn’t prepared for the gravity of what he was facing and so he kept believing he would be better in the morning.
Before dawn he opened his eyes to see baby curled up on his chest. She was talking to him telepathically. She said to Dominic, “If you go to the hospital right now, you will live.” And he did.
He thought about that first day he and Edward brought baby home. He brought her up on the bed away from the other cats so they could be introduced slowly, and he wanted her to know that their home was a safe and loving and comfortable place. And when he looked at her, she seemed to be smiling out from her kitten’s body, but really she was just happy to be peeing.
He saw so much of himself in baby. That loneliness that is so hard to fill. That not belonging. He wanted her to know, to experience the filling of that void and the best way he knew how to do that was through love and touch, because he knew that’s what he always longed for.
Dominic looked down at the plastic bag and then out to the sea. He knew baby was no longer the ashes in that bag. He knew that her body was only his way of connecting her to the world in a tactile way. He knew that when she died in his arms and her golden eyes turned a milky gray. In a wisp of air her soul was released from gravity. But yet he couldn’t seem to let those ashes go. He couldn’t watch the molecules, the atoms that were left of her, dissolve into that vast grayness in front of him. And he knew it was because he himself was still flesh and blood, a physical composite of those same atoms, bound to earth and struggling to hold on to the only thing he knew as life.
He turned and looked back at the hills rising above the shoreline. He could hear the speeding of cars, the impatient horns, but suddenly he realized that the roar of the ocean was consistently drowning them out. The power of water even evident in its sound, minimizing anything we think humanly important. Telling us it’s not. Dominic stood looking forward, then backwards and then down to the sand and his feet and his place in between.
Since he was a young boy he had dreamed of moving to Hollywood and the life he would create. Of the important person he would become, a celebrity in his own right, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Not that it couldn’t have for he was, back then, full of rebellion and brio. But after years of not having anyone to guide him through his then young life, he found he could only really listen to himself, a dangerously naive path. And he learned that sometimes heeding the advice of a stranger can mean the difference between finding oneself well beyond the fork in the road and miles down a tragically wrong path.
At twenty, he received an unexpected invitation to take a Caribbean cruise, by a friend who was playing in a band on an ocean liner. It was winter break and Dominic had just finished up a year at Boston University. In January he would be heading to London to attend a year abroad. In some ways he had planned his year away quite well, but in others it was ill-conceived. It was yet another way in which he would realize, years later, that his lack of parental guidance had put him at a great disadvantage.
It was New Year’s Eve and the boat had made a stop in Nassau. New passengers boarded the ship and one of them was a British woman, a regular passenger on the ship and known to the crew as a person with an uncanny gift for seeing into the future. She was also friendly with Dominic’s musician friend and so it happened that they all spent the evening celebrating the New Year together. But Dominic would find her staring at him. It unsettled him and he did his best to keep a safe distance between them. As Dominic stood out on the deck looking out over the moon and stars reflecting on the sea, Penelope, the woman, was suddenly by his side.
“I know you’re about to do something that you think will make your life better,” she said, “but I can only say, don’t do it. If you go, you will experience terrible things, terrible things, beyond anything you imagine. It will set you back years. I know you’re willful and stubborn and I know you don’t know me, but I’m compelled to try and stop you from making this mistake.”
She ended by saying something about a card, but it was so vague he wasn’t quite sure what she was on about.
That night, as he lay in bed, her words kept floating in an out of his head with the deep, slow sway of the ship on the open water. He was rattled by them, but by morning he had dismissed them as the words of a woman who had too many flutes of champagne.
In My Sight.
That moment on my walk, I saw it. It was stark against the concrete it rested on. A contrast from the many-shaded brilliant greens that were now bursting forth in the warmer, growing days of sunlight. It stayed motionless and yet I knew by instinct, life was pulsing forth in it. I have never seen such a creature in all my wanderlust days of youthful nature hikes and now, walks through the city wild. That is, of that color. In my discovery, I saw the world incapsulated. Our attraction to the unknown, our repellence of anything different, borne of our own ignorance. Of mine. Nature is full of aposematism. But we in our modern world, have lost touch with nature, our own nature especially. It takes a concerted effort to really see, to take in what is actually in front of us, and then to look deeper, to use our instincts. But even those have been mired under what we think is knowledge in this technological world. Out here is the real, expressive world. Why? I don’t know, but a Haiku instantly came to mind.
By sight unmoving
It was singularly black
Poised for a new life
A caterpillar.