All Summer Long
“Fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future…hence the only valid tense is the present. The Now.”
All summer long he wore the same 3 swim trunks, all shades of blue. He would alternate between the 3, often wearing the same pair multiple days in a row. Sometimes he would wear those awful beige khaki cargo shorts he knew I hated, where I’d mutter sarcastically under my breath: “The only place those belong is in the trash.” He’d throw his hands up in the air in silent protest, in that “I don’t know what you’re talking about” sort of way, with the corners of his eyes creasing as he tried to hold back his bright smile. All summer long he would pick me up in his grey Toyota truck, usually no less than 30 minutes late, and we’d drive along the highway with the surfboards hanging out the back, all the windows rolled down. I’d let the wind in my hair sweep away all my concerns with his punctuality and I’d be wiped completely clean as he looked over to me from the drivers’ side, elbow casually draped over the open window, blue eyes penetrating the remnants of hesitation or palpable warning signs. All summer long I’d stand in his kitchen in my favorite red sun dress, my hair wet and cascading over my sun-drenched shoulders, chopping vegetables, and humming Jack Johnson as it played in the background. He would sit in the living room watching me, always remarking on how beautiful I looked or how lucky he was. But there was still a room separating the two of us, me in the kitchen and him in the living room, me doing the labor of love, the heavy lifting, and him relaxed with feet up on the couch.
It’s true what they say. We really do become our mothers.
If my Mother was ever the kind to be transparent or vulnerable when it comes to my Dad, she would have told me that not all honeymoons last. That what goes up must come down—and she would do so while twirling her wedding ring on her left hand, the ever-present subliminal messaging of what it means to settle in lackluster and lukewarm waters of love and marriage.
I’m not sure if it was a subconscious protest to not settle like my mother, but I left that blue eyed man as the first winter swell hit the island and it was just cool enough to wear a sweater. It wasn’t the fact that he was late all the time or the fact that he wore the same shorts for days in a row, it was the fact that I was my mother and I had chosen a man too much like my father. I left him and I invited myself to sit in the rubble of this eradication, the final nail on the coffin of dating men like Dad. Rest in peace relationship patterns.
The thing with rubble is I tend to marinate in it for longer than I need to. Sadness envelopes me, it lingers. I sit cross-legged, hunched over in the masses of rubble where I examine it, over and over until I memorize every crack or divot, every fracture or sharp edge. I’ll eventually get sick of my own self from sitting in my self-imposed heaps of sorrow-- where time and my own, sometimes fleeting, willpower will allow the large slabs to turn to rocks, to pebbles, and eventually sand. When it becomes course like salt, I begin to crawl. Sand belongs to the sea like a trail of breadcrumbs leading to promised land, and it was convenient that I live in Hawaii and Mother Ocean lived in my backyard.
I crawled to the water on my hands and knees before the current slowly swept me into its depths—soon I was weightless. My surfboard was with me, and it was much more than a vehicle of transcendence but merely a floatation device for my grief. I’d be treading water and out of breath, and I’d tug on my leash, and it would come back to me like a boomerang. Always there to keep the heavy grief afloat.
The thing about grief and loss of a lover is the fact that is completely fucks up the amygdala, leaving fear as an afterthought instead of an immediate threat. My typical resistance to waves the size of myself was obliterated. I was beginning to look at my own fear-based edges dead in the eye, with more of a challenge than a cower. That the processing of yet another failed relationship with a man too similar, too dismissive like my Dad drove me to give one big middle finger to fear as it relates to life, and finding solace in proving myself wrong. There’s something to be said about glancing over my shoulder and feeling to small spray of white water as tall as my head as it nips at my heels, replacing the thoughts of what was or what could have been. When it comes to surfing, you look where you’re going. Playing with my fears enabled me to reorient my gaze inward and in turn, forward, drawing my line on the face of a wave, which is really just looking ahead and noticing life’s glorious and messy unfolding -- where my attention had belonged all along.
So I sat there day after day straddling my surfboard, my life raft of sorts, with fear being a whisper instead of a shout. I had begun to catch sight of the fact that it’s impossible to obsess over any sort of rubble when my eyes were constantly fixed on the horizon. Straight ahead or down the line, bobbing about in Mother Ocean who’s mere coaxing of myself to the present moment and the path ahead that taught me more about life than any therapist or daddy issues or ex-boyfriend:
Life sucks. It really does. But life is also really, really beautiful.