Oceans

I am susceptible at any moment to a flood of tears.  I’m blaming them this time on the dissolution of my marriage—the slow letting go of the man I’ve loved for 8 years.  I am impatient with myself, impatient with the fact that I’m still writing about tears… that “flood of tears” is the cliché metaphor which jumps to me at this moment…

I’ve written that word so often, “tears” that it seems           to  have little meaning.

 Let me explain, I want you to understand…

but truly I want to understand,

this is why I write.

I’ve written tears in my journals since the second grade.  Crying over lost pets, spilt beverages, confusing emotions. Tears, when in middle school, I would never be pretty enough for a boyfriend, tears in high school, when I “finally” had one and we did nothing but argue.  The boys names changed but the tears stayed.  The common theme amongst them: me fitting myself to what others wanted, the tears an expression of my true self leaking free. 

I think this now, suddenly, in a flash of realization.

The boys have been distractions from the reality of life, the truth of my own physical existence.  Finally, in my late twenties, this is what I’m facing:  What’s really here.  Who I really am.  What I really want.  It’s the first time I’ve ever asked myself these questions and been able to listen for the answers without the shadow of another. And I am terrified.  And I am elated.

            I am charged to discover what sits behind the hard surface of my body, behind the physical wetness of the tears which soak my skin.  Perhaps I will discover the true source of the restlessness that presses on my stomach.  Because, you see, in the space between the start of my ribcage and the flesh covering my back there is an ocean.

            It is an ocean, which has been storming for almost three decades, without release of energy.  On occasion a few drops leak through the cracks, but these are grains of sand in a universe of particles.  Imagine, if you will, a sea held inside a glass dome, gaining strength and losing it. Pounding its liquid body against the edges of existence. 

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I grew up “internationally.”  Perhaps this is why it has always seemed to me that anything I do must have global relevance.  Perhaps this is why it is hard to justify sitting in silence with a pen in my hand re-living the past, re-imagining the future.   

By the time I was five, a blond girl with pigtails and a grey and green wool uniform, I had met people from all over the world at my international school in Brussels Belgium.  By junior high our playground games had transformed into quiet nationality wars, between “The Americans” and well, “the rest.”  Even surrounded by colorful images of multi-cultural harmony, we were not immune to the nationalism of snickers bars and video games.

            “America’s the best!” I can remember friends—mostly boys—declaring loudly during lunch period, sure that others would overhear.  In the classrooms our teachers, from all over the world, taught us about globalism and tolerance, but we had TV.  We knew the truth.

            In fourth grade social studies class we read the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel.  The images of international catastrophes in the song did nothing to help my already growing anxiety about a violent and complex world of which I wanted no part, but was part of nonetheless.  The music and lyrics stirred my soul.  I didn’t want to be an American, but I was.

            The teacher wanted us to sing along with her.  I jumped in.  It was perhaps the first time I loved poetry.  Halfway through the first stanza I was horrified to find that I was so lost in the words I hadn’t noticed I was one of the only students participating in the sing-a-long.    

Certain I had already been labeled “dork” by all in attendance, I scaled back my enthusiasm, hiding my disappointment behind a head hung low.   

A few drops added themselves to my ocean. 

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It used to be that I’d have to be awake for a while before the tears would find me.  The morning used to begin freshly, life would have to lead up to crying: An angry word from my father, a cross look from my mother, an exasperated sigh from a teacher, perhaps not even directed at me, an argument with my younger brother because he was teasing, or “hogging” the Nintendo, or because below it all I sensed myself alone in a world where my “sensitivity” did not fit.

            I always thought I’d get “better” with time.  Perhaps this was am idea implanted, unintentionally, by my parents with their repeated commands to “grow up,” “be more mature,” to stop making things into such a “big deal.”  But the command to control something which came like rain from the sky, unexplained and dependent on the forces of nature, was futile.  I thought growing up meant a steady progression away from tears. I didn’t know that suppressing them was filling an ocean inside my chest. 

Now, when I wake, the ocean is here.  There is already a salty taste on my lips and a crust building around the edge of my eyes, they are the names of babies I might never have,  the feel of a new lovers skin next to me, full of life, yet last night I imagined, after we made love, what it might be like to see him in a coffin.

Soon, my ribcage will break open—a clean tear from the force of rushing salt water, sea urchins and foam spewing forth:

Those star fish from the tide pools I loved when we vacationed in Holland. 

The Rainbow Parrot Fish from the Minnesota zoo. I visited him faithfully each time we went, his bulging eye unblinking from a tiny tank.

 The entire North Atlantic, over which I shed tears upon tears, each time we moved overseas.

 The Pacific on whose edge, as an adult, I could find no peace—first in Australia looking for purpose, then in Northern California with a heavy backpack and a storm pushing me to the ground. 

Finally, on my honeymoon in Hawaii, the beginning of a short marriage, where on the edge of a five star resort, I decided once and for all that oceans are not peaceful, they boil up inside me and stir things that I cannot understand from the bottom of the sea floor.