Grownup. A word dripping wet with youthful secrets and first ventures into worldliness. I had felt so alone before then, back in the days when I was a child searching for the place between the horizon and stroke of ocean. My first drug, my first kiss, everything was yet to be a first then. And in that first-ness I dared to love everything. Now that I’m beyond these marvels, I find myself looking over my shoulder in remembrance. The seasons grew up and died each year until I stumbled across adulthood, bewildered.

 

            Spring exhales upon an elderly winter after the leaves have shivered to the ground, letting go of life once more, and making room for newborn green and bursts of flowers. Grammy’s bright blue house reaches for the trees, roof held high in an elegant peak. The older my grandmother and I have both become, the more the lawn has become overgrown and unkempt, dead branches littering the ground like fallen soldiers. The grass reaches my waist when it used to barely brush my ankles. Familiar trees have died and been cut down, and all of the forsythia bushes need trimmed. The swing set in the backyard is rusty, the red paint chipping. Our old treehouse slouches in a tired way, and I can see the piles of debris on the floor that indicate that it never gets played in anymore. Chestnuts are scattered on the steps leading up to my grandmother’s front door, and I remember when I was still a kid I would walk up her driveway along the pond, hearing the croak of bullfrogs, watching the early evening fireflies wink, and Grammy would be outside sweeping her steps diligently until they were immaculate.

 

            She would pause only to stoop over and pick up the caterpillars and ladybugs and place them on the stone wall next to her, saying, “You’re in my way, you shouldn’t be here”.

 

            A scraped knee, an unfulfilled wish, a broken heart, my grandmother’s response was always the same, “Why are you crying? Did somebody die?” It may have not always had the sobering effect that she intended, but I still hear it in my head sometimes, in those moments when I question my own tears.

 

            “You know, honey, God blessed me with so many girls. I used to pray all the time that I could have a sister and instead I got three daughters.” Grammy smiles, pleased with herself.

 

            I think about all of the men in my grandmother’s life, somehow swept away by waves stronger than themselves. The step-father who raised her was a nice man, an Alabaman farm boy who worked off a carpenter’s wage in Queens with three kids and a wife to support. He built the house she lived in as a teenager with his own Southern tanned hands, calloused by years of woodwork. He ran off with my grandmother’s best friend when she was sixteen.

 

            These were my bedtime stories.

 

            “After my little brother died and my father left, you know what I did? I cried. I cried at my window for two weeks and didn’t eat a thing. I cried to the point that the radiator in my room rusted. I looked in the mirror, and the blood vessels beneath my eyes had burst. I cried so much then that I decided I would never cry again. I had cried enough for a lifetime.”

 

            My grandmother’s living room is her waiting room. As long as I’ve know Grammy she has seen this world as the place you linger in until you can finally go home to those who leave before you do.

 

            “I remember he looked like a doll in my hand, his fingers were smaller than I ever imagined fingers could be! I could see it was a boy…and I stared at him, holding him in my palm until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and put him a sandwich bag and went to the hospital. They wouldn’t let me see my baby boy after that. The nurse told me that I didn’t need to. I knew that they had a crematorium at the hospital, to burn loose limbs and that sort of thing. I remember thinking when I woke up that morning that it was snowing, but then I saw it was grey like my baby boy. I watched the ashes flurry past the hospital window, and I realized that was his goodbye. Those were the ashes of his body. His ashes, and he was saying goodbye.”

 

            She looks out her living room window, searching for ashes in a parched sky that has no more snowflakes left to give. This makes me think of my own brother who has sailed away from me to far-off, unreachable shores. 

​

 

***

 

            The way Grammy used to look at the water made it seem she was having a silent conversation with it, defeat and resolution in her eyes. Wrinkles had fallen upon her youth, my grandmother’s face a blooming garden of time. I loved to look at her, how the lines on her face seemed to write the story of her life, and to watch the reflection of the water lapping in her gaze. She looked like someone always imprisoned in her daydream.

 

            We walk hand in hand along the turquoise Floridian waters, listening to the whispers of the waves, and scavenging for sea shells. I’m aware of the tightness of Grammy’s grasp in the high summer weather, my sticky five-year old fingers slicked with sweat. We maintain a solid six feet from the reach of the water. If we happen to get close enough and I accidentally slip my foot in, she yanks me back and says, “Not one toe!”. Her New Yorker accent often made her sound harsher than she actually was.

 

            I didn’t mind if I couldn’t go swimming as long as Grammy was there because I liked to have her all to myself. That didn’t often happen with fifteen cousins, especially as the second to youngest. My parents sent my siblings and I to summer in Florida until late fall for every year as long as I can remember and I would come back to the cold of the Northeast, my skin shades darker than when I left. I allow the peace of her companionship to seep into me and let it wash away how much I miss my parents.

 

            I stoop over to pick up a rather large clam shell, but when I realize there is a hole in it, I toss it away.

 

            “What was wrong with that one?” Grammy asks.

 

            “It had a hole in it.” I say simply, and tug her forward, my bucket swinging on my arm. She stays rooted to the ground and bends over to pick up the shell that I had thrown away.

 

            “That’s not a bad hole. You could make a necklace or something out of it. Here, look at the color,” she leans down for me to see. “Isn’t that a pretty color?”

 

            My two year old sister, Victoria, toddles over with my Aunt Franny. All feelings of calm flee. My aunt is a talker; I could feel our conversation slip away into the wind at their approach. I take the shell from Grammy’s outstretched hand and walk away unnoticed.

 

            I build sandcastles on the beach and play with driftwood, listening to the sound of crashing waves in the sea shells, my grandmother and aunt’s dull conversation carried over by the breeze. It doesn’t seem fair that my brothers and all of my older cousins are allowed to go into the water up to their knees, but that I’m confined to land. Who goes to a beach just to look at the water?

           

***

 

            My mom read books to my siblings and I when we were little. One I liked especially was called No Flying in the House, about fairies and how in order to be one, you have to be able to kiss your elbow. She also read us a lot of books about living dolls. Miss Hickory was one, but my favorite was Hitty: Her First Hundred Years. Her voice would splash over our dark heads as we sat in a circle at her feet, scraped knees touching, her soft boyish voice swirling around us. We never did finish that last book about the dolls.

 

            My grandmother on the other hand, wasn’t that big on books. She liked to tell the same stories over and over again. So she’d let me pick from one of the thirteen or so photo albums on the bookshelf in her living room and we would settle into a chair together, looking at the pictures one by one.

 

            She told me everybody’s life stories as if they had been sung by the fairies lounging in the branches of the old wood that surrounded her house, and in this way, her tales glittered with the silver of so many yesterdays. This is why I know my second cousin Tammy, who I have never met, is most likely the bastard of an Italian sales associate who worked at Walbaum’s Department Store (at least that’s what my grandmother suspected anyway). It’s why I know my great-great-great grandfather’s first wife died when she fell and hit her head while cleaning the curtains in their house. Her name was Rose. The kids were at home, still toddlers. This is how I know my great-great Aunt Bessie had a bad leg, and her husband (who I have also never met) was a “cluck” from Israel who abandoned his new wife two weeks into their marriage.

 

            “Mrs. Daily was a widow and she owned the candy shop on the bottom floor of our building,” my grandmother begins. Her finger, crumpled like a ball of paper, rests on the photograph. We have the same hands. Tiny palms, thick finger—strong hands. The black and white photograph showed five story apartment buildings lining the street of a middle class neighborhood. Flowers spring from the window boxes and laundry sways on the line above the street in a wind frozen by time. A memory all too real, yet not my own.

 

            “All the neighborhood kids would come in after school to buy licorice or candy cigarettes, what have you. Now— my family lived levels above the candy store and my brothers would always try to figure out ways to drill holes through each floor in order to pick the candies up out of their jars, maybe with some string that had a piece of chewing gum attached at the end.” Her laugh rings out in the middle of the living room, bounces off the spines of books, and brushes against the water stained ceiling.

 

            “We lived there during wartime, and a while after that. Pauline, a teenager who lived in our apartment building, would babysit us in the evenings when our parents would go out drinking at the bar across the street. Every night. Like clockwork.”

 

            Maybe I’m like my grandmother’s mother. I don’t know. She had addiction tendencies, major depressive disorder, and dreamed herself to death just like me. She was once my age in another century. We share the same name, but not the same life. She died before I existed, and I’m alive now. Then. Out of nowhere, you’re old. One day I’ll be old. One day my youth will glide away into the clouds, wherever time goes. I’ll be left with nothing but a clock to count the hours passing. I sometimes wonder if the theory of eternalism is true and all of time is dancing together at once, instead of a soloist alone in the spotlight whose steps were predetermined a thousand years before their performance.

 

            My great-grandmother’s dream for my grandmother was for her to become a prima-ballerina. She took lessons from an ex-Rockette. My grandmother spent her adolescence on her tiptoes, even going as far as dancing on the stage of Radio City Music Hall. This might be why I was learning how to dance when I was pretty much still learning how to walk. In ballet class my teacher would tell me to keep my chin up, but not too high when performing an arabesque. I’m not quite certain if me writing this and me performing an arabesque is happening side by side, moments completing a pas de deux together like the album of memories resting in my grandmother’s hands.

 

            When we would work our way to more recent photo albums, I would point out the people I knew. In one photo my older twin brothers are naked in a paddle pool. I remember at that age they refused to wear clothes and walked around our front yard naked.

 

            “There are Taylor and Colin!” I exclaim.

 

            I used to be one of the only people who could tell my brothers apart. Even our parents would get fooled sometimes when they switched clothes. In the photo next to that one, Colin is at a local carnival with a stick of blue cotton candy almost gone, the paste of wet purple sugar circling a smile that cascades to the bottom of his chin. Colin— not quite as troubled, not quite as high-strung. Colin was ten minutes younger and always the easier child, probably because Taylor always required so much attention. Looking at those snapshots of the twins now, their faces are so unclouded. There’s no sadness there. That’s what stands out the most about my brother Taylor in his childhood photos. The smile isn’t painful. The eyes aren’t tinged with something wild.

​

 

***

​

            The hallway of my childhood house is dim, almost to the point of darkness. I can see a little light trickling past the dirt-streaked window panes. I know that my mother is coming home soon because of the faint ache in my chest, the moment before happiness. I come out of my room. Over my shoulder, my doorway looks like a black cave gaping in the night. A knock at the door. Knock. Knock. Knock. A knock again. Before I reach the handle of our old white door it sways open. My mother stands on the wooden porch in the orange rain of lamplight. She comes inside, her face shrouded with displeasure to see me out of bed after ten o’clock. I remember as a child I could feel the distance between she and I. I often wonder if Taylor ever felt that way too. Did he feel the distance in the years that separated children from their parents, like I did? Almost like time really isn’t equal, but instead the amount of time that someone lives through lengthens the space between those who haven’t seen as much time pass by.

​

​

***

​

             “Hey, we couldn’t find you.” I feel cool fingertips settle on my shoulder. Taylor looks down at me, the dyed red streak in his dark hair gleaming under the ferris wheel lights above us. We’re on vacation in Atlantic City and I’m fifteen.

 

            “Oh,” I say distractedly, trying not to bump into anyone as we walk toward Victoria and Colin. “I lost you guys.”

 

            The crowds lean into overpriced souvenir shops, greasy fry-up shacks, and bars that smell like seaweed. They pour into the flash of casinos, game stalls, and ice cream stands spending their hard-earned money on the high of the dizzyingly hot day.

 

            We thread in and out of the clusters of bodies and amusement park rides on the pier until we get back to the boardwalk. I have twenty bucks in the pocket of my indigo sundress and I have no idea what to spend it on. I consider playing one of those rigged games to try to win a humongous stuffed animal, or getting a mini henna tattoo, but I can’t justify spending it on any of those things. A trolly rolls past and the sun plunges into the orange sea. It makes no difference anyway, the blinking lights of the billboards light up everything like it’s daylight. Taylor shakes his head while Victoria and Colin walk ahead of us.

 

            “You’re such a cheapskate,” he says.

 

            “It’s in the blood, what can I say?” I laugh.

 

            “You guys!” Colin calls from a few yards ahead of us. “We’re going into the arcade. We’ll meet up with you later!”

 

            I nod and they go inside the arcade.

 

            Musicians warm up on benches lining the boardwalk, opening their instrument cases for donations. We wander aimlessly into the kind of t-shirt stores where they sell coca-colas, paper weights, and beach towels and all the prices are negotiable.

 

            “Hey, do you want to walk onto the beach?” Taylor asks.

 

            “Yeah,” I say, “that would be nice.”

 

            We go down the flight of stairs leading onto a path lined with tall grass. I feel a little worried walking onto the beach at night with just the two of us. We could somehow get pulled into the water and drown. I imagine a wave reaching out and grabbing us. I smile to myself remembering that I need to shake off these irrational worries. I’m learning, I tell myself. I can just hear what Grammy would say: “Don’t go into the water at night! You can’t see what’s in it and how far you’re going!” But Grammy isn’t here. She’s at home, sitting in her living room, watching old reruns of television shows and movies while Grampy lays on the couch mumbling sleepy replies to her exaggerated comments.

 

            Taylor scoops up a handful of sand, letting it slowly run through his fingers. He’s been absentminded lately, as if he’s never truly present, always walking to places faraway without ever taking a physical step.

 

            “Do you want to just put our feet in?”

 

            Despite my anxiety, I feel myself smile.

 

            “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

 

            We let the water slip over our feet. The waves sigh onto the shore and we don’t say much. Taylor and I often didn’t need conversation to understand each other, it was a natural understanding that we already did.

 

            I remember us running and laughing along the beach after that, invigorated with our strange rebellion, the sand crushing against our heels and flying behind us.

​

***

​

            Taylor was institutionalized at eighteen for suicidal ideations and bipolar disorder. He tried jumping out of the car on the way to a clinic called The Meadows. There was something so creepy about the name. Before, when I pictured a meadow, I saw a place where green grows. I thought of life and freedom, of naps drenched in sunlight, warm wind scented with earth and wildflowers. Now, when I think of a meadow, I no longer see the ripple of a countryside. I see metal, stone, and glass; doors leading to more doors with more locks and unlocking those locks leading to another door with another lock and no answers.

 

            Because I was two years shy of adulthood, I wasn’t allowed to visit Taylor at The Meadows, but at the state hospital he was transferred to next, the rules were different. As long as I was accompanied by an adult I could visit.

 

            The psych ward is tucked into the attic of the state hospital, more of an afterthought than a treatment center. After we sign in, we are lead into a common area where a group of patients lounge around on generic furniture watching a horror movie. I feel relieved to see this because I know at the last place they mostly played shows like the Teletubbies. I don’t see a change of expression on the faces of the patients when blood bursts in generous bouquets across the screen. They all seem to gaze at the screen like they are staring at a solitary wall, as if everything is a matter of waiting.

 

            Mom and I find a table, and maybe two minutes after we sit down, I see Taylor shuffling towards us down a hallway bleached the color of daisies. For the most part they talk, and I listen, when my mom gets up to go to the bathroom, I stretch out my hand. He takes it across the table, but won’t look at me.

 

            “Taylor,” I say. He still won’t look at me. “I’m right here.”

 

             Maybe it’s something in my voice, but he looks at me. Really, really looks. Dark crescents hang from lines folded under his eyes, his olive tone skin tinged a sallow green, and coarse thorns of stubble sprout across his jawline. Taylor’s considered good looking by most, but sorrow has interrupted his beauty. The only thing that is the same is the thick frame of wavy black hair, perhaps a little longer than when I saw him three months before, and the prominent nose, a common trait on both of sides of the men in our family. He’s lost weight. Too much. His white t-shirt drapes loosely from the pegs of his bones as if there is no body left for the fabric to cling to. His clothes seem more for show, a drapery meant to decorate bleak walls; a gesture that has absolutely nothing to do with modesty.

 

            He tries to force a smile, but it is an unconvincing imitation.

 

            “How are you?” he asks me.

 

            I shake my head, smiling at his ridiculous question. “Fine. How are you?”

 

            “They took away my drawing pens,” He looks around him to check if anyone is listening. “So now I can’t even do my art. I’m so bored.”

 

            “Why did they take away your pens?”

 

            He grips the edge of the table and starts bouncing his knees, an old nervous habit.       

     

            “They think I’m going to kill myself with them.”

 

            I look at his hands flattened against the table, as though he is trying to hide in plain sight, the blue holes that spatter his knuckles.

 

            I press my lips together. “Did you start stabbing yourself again?”

 

            He shrugs, his empty eyes flicking to the TV screen flooded with blood.

 

            Sometimes the way he would turn away from me felt like there was something he saw that made him sad because he could never look at me for too long.

 

***

​

            Taylor and my grandmother have the same light blue eyes, eyes swimming with ocean. They remind me of the Velvet Underground song, Pale Blue Eyes.

 

Sometimes I feel so happy,

 

Sometimes I feel so sad,

 

…Linger on

 

Your pale blue eyes…

 

           And if Taylor had a song. This one would be his.

 

***

            “You’re changing,” Taylor says to me.

 

            The violet lights of Atlantic City drip in the rain that streaks the bus windows. There’s something serious in his voice, a heaviness to his words.     

     

            “What makes you say that?” I ask, a laugh dangling from my voice. I don’t think he’s serious; it’s too soon to come down from the giddiness of our night run on the beach and I shift my legs, feeling the hard grains of sand in my shoes.

 

            “I don’t know exactly,” he studies my face. “You look different. Like you still look young, yet somehow older. It’s in your eyes. And I feel like you’re not saying anything out loud because you don’t understand it yourself yet.”

 

            Any thought of a smile fades from my lips.

 

            “Do you know what I mean?” he asks.

 

            “I think so…” I say. “I think I know what you mean. Sort of.”

 

            He lowers his voice, eyeing the passengers surrounding us in the dark bus. “I think I noticed it because I feel that way sometimes too. More so lately than ever.”

 

            “You feel sad right?” I murmur. “You can’t really leave it behind. It’s like you’re sad, all the time.”

 

            His leans his shoulder against mine, lowering his head toward the floor. “I’m not really sure what to do, Gabby. I feel like I can’t control it.”

 

            I look at my brother, the kid who I built all my snowmen with, the person who was beside me when I went on bike rides and hikes, who sat on the floor coloring with me. I look at the person I’ve known all my life, moved by the fear he feels over something he cannot see.

 

            “Sometimes I think it’s school. Then I think it might be mom and dad, but I know it’s not their fault and it’s just me. I’m the problem.” His hands rest in his lap with palms curled open as though he is waiting to receive manna from heaven. It is in this moment that I know there is no such thing as a magic cure to fill the hole left behind where happiness abandoned him.

 

            “I think what part of it is…you feel overwhelmed. It feels like there’s no escape.”

 

            “Yeah!” his voice cracks and he clears his throat. “I just want to disappear sometimes. Forget everything. I feel like I’m just hurting you guys because I can’t be okay a lot of the time. I really don’t know what’s wrong.”

 

            “Hey, listen…” I look into his eyes. “It’s sadness. It’s not even real. And if we can think of it like that, maybe we’ll be okay?”

 

            I put my arm around his shoulder and we gaze out the window together until we get back to the hotel. I wish I could say that we healed each other with our words that night, but then, they are just words.

​

​

***

​

            My great aunt what’s-her-name from one of my grandmother’s stories would come to mind when the doctors would talk about when, or if, Taylor could be released. She placed a rocking chair in the middle of a busy street and sat down stark naked in it one a day in the 1950’s or something like that. I think that I was told she killed herself in the end.

 

            These words my little sister found in a diary Taylor kept while institutionalized: scrawled in blue ink pressed down too hard on notebook paper, “He sucked me off— hard! I think I’m in love with Satan.” He had opinions of all of us in there. He had predictions. He predicted my life, and my death. I thought that if Taylor was this out of his mind, that must mean that he was stranded on some distant planet, separate from his loved ones and so afraid of defeat.

 

            One night, a phone call rings out in the dark. Taylor’s voice gets put through by the institution, “I had a dream about you. You were drowning, but you weren’t really. It was like the water was electrified and you wanted to say something but you couldn’t open your mouth. Not even to scream. So you just kept on drowning.”

​

 

***

​

            Finally, Taylor can come home. Those were my first thoughts when I heard that Taylor was being released from the hospital.

 

            “Taylor,” I plead.

 

            “I can’t help it, Gabby. I just want to kill everyone. Especially the people I love. Especially you.”

 

            He is squeezing me so hard that I can barely breathe. His sobs smash into my shirt, the tears soaking the fabric.

 

            I force a few words from my throat. “Taylor. I’m right here. You don’t have to be afraid.” He squeezes tighter. I feel myself beginning to pass out. The thing is, just like in his dream, I have no words left to say. I don’t know what made him change his mind.

 

Maybe the whispered, “I love you,” but he lets me go, and disappears down the hallway.

 

            I don’t really know how Taylor is doing anymore.

 

            Taylor never learned how to swim in the ways that counted. I have this image of Taylor stuck in my head. Fighting the current, just about to break the surface of water with arms that disobey his best intentions to grasp for life. He thrashes below a ceiling of ocean, and then floats downwards before he can get his head above the water. The inevitability of becoming overwhelmed by the waves crashing in the edges of his sad eyes. Will his sadness ever allow him to see the world in a color other than blue?

 

            I suppose people are sort of like tsunamis. They can wash you away, or get washed away.

​

 

***

​

            “Never come back here!” My grandmother yells at Taylor. He must have been around thirteen. I remember, more clearly than anything else that day, the way that my brother stood; an ice statue. For a second, I thought I saw his heart disappear.

 

            He looked hard and long at our grandmother, her eyes squinting in the sunlight, chest heaving. I wonder what he saw. Because after that, he turned around, and started walking home. He didn’t even look over his shoulder. I don’t know what she had been mad at him about. Something to do with teasing our little sister, abusing frogs, or something like that. It sounds like a small thing, but Taylor hardly visited my grandmother after that day, even after the years passed by.

​

 

***

​

            I can see the figure of my Uncle Warren disappearing into a decades-old horizon. He’s in his navy uniform. He’s soaked to the bone from a slew of rain thrown upon him, life throbbing in the beauty of his straight-backed step. The city rises up with his image, and surrounding his walk is the street I will never see except in my grandmother’s voice. When she speaks, I see his ship get blasted apart by Russian bombers, and I see his lungs fill with blood and sea, and the shards of his flesh float out on the surface of a water too blue to see what’s underneath. I hear the words that won’t come when his parents receive the paper that shrieks in bold black letters MISSING PRESUMED DEAD. Through this gap of time, if I part the curtains just right, I catch sight of the tears of the girl he loved.

 

***

​

            A shining purple hotel rises up behind the dock in South Carolina. I remember my grandmother and Taylor standing at the end of it, talking. He can’t have been older than eleven. I don’t know what they were saying, just the hum of words that I caught from afar. I imagine she must have been pointing out the large boulders stacked near the edge of the shore, or commenting on the cloudiness of the sky. As I approach them, I feel a raindrop fall onto my forehead. She puts her hands on his shoulders. I know how gingerly she does this, just like her. She brushes his bangs from his forehead and looks at him so deeply. I know how her whisper rustles the little hairs that rest against his earlobe. And I know just what she says because she’s said it all of her life.

 

            “You’re my first special boy. My firstborn grandson. You will always be my special boy.”

 

            Then she points out to the ocean, and looks back at me. “Come!” she beckons.

 

            I reach the end of the dock and see the outline of whales against the grey sky. They weave in and out of the water and my brother’s face breaks into a smile.

 

            “They’re singing,“ he says in awe.

 

            The whale cries mix with the sound of waves colliding against the wooden limbs of the dock and the high-pitched squawks of the seagulls flying overhead.

 

            Taylor climbs up the side of the dock, leans over, and looks out to the whales, almost as if he’s tempted to throw himself over the edge just to be with them.

 

            “Careful, Taylor,” my grandmother says anxiously. “Don’t fall into the ocean.”

 

            Taylor glances over at us, his messy hair flying around him, smile crooked as a backroad.

 

            “I’ll try not to,” he responds.

 

            Even now, I can hear the whales calling. I can still remember their song.

​

 

***

​

            Two weeks after Taylor is released from the psych ward, we visit our grandmother. Looking back on it now, I think maybe this wasn’t a very wise decision. He was trying out a new medication. I can’t count how many new drugs my brother’s body had been exposed to that year.

 

            My grandmother, my aunt, my sister, and I are all sitting at the table listening to Taylor’s wild ranting.

 

            “You’re going to kill yourself. That’s how you’ll die. Someday, probably in your late 20’s to early 30’s, and this,” Taylor gestures to the blue dusk of the windows next to the table. “Life. It’s all going to become too much, and you’ll only want to die. So then you’ll kill yourself. I know you will. You’re going to kill yourself,” he tells me.

 

            The words stay suspended in the air between us, gobbling up every last microscopic atom of the close acrid kitchen scent.

 

            “Maybe,” I say.

 

            I don’t cry because what he said makes me sad. Well, maybe I do, a little. But mostly I cry because when I look at my grandmother, so much older now, back naturally hunched, breasts hanging over the brown laminated tabletop, I see tears trickle down her sun-spotted cheeks. So many words, so many worthless thoughts stay stuffed inside my head burning constantly, and when these words spill out into reality, they burn hotter. When I say them it leaves yet another scar with nothing to comfort them.

 

            “Maybe I will kill myself one day. But I think that’s what you want, Taylor,” Finally. The words. “You don’t want to be alone. Believing about me what you can’t believe about yourself, makes things a little less scary for you. And I don’t mind. You know better than anyone that I’ve wanted to. But I don’t think you really know me as well as I know myself.”

 

            We sit staring at one another around the doily-covered table with a glass fruit bowl of too ripe peaches between us, not knowing what to say, and we are still.

 

            And then, one morning, Taylor is gone. I wake up to the crackle of tires on gravel, receding into the distance, until it is only a faint murmur of engine sputter and there is nothing left to hear but how loud the quiet is. He disappears into long stretches of American highway, into the crushed city lights of Houston, and settles down in a trailer beside the beach with only curtains for doors. We don’t really talk like we did when we were kids. I don’t think that we can. Probably because every time we talk, I have to talk him down from a ledge. 

 

            That night, I stretch out my arms to make angel wings in the frozen glass sand. I wonder if I’ll drown in the snowfall. Maybe I can just sleep out here, let the snowflakes cover me in sheets of winter. They wouldn’t find me until I thawed in the spring. I can picture ice sprouting crystal flowers across my arms and legs, tiptoeing up my torso to my neck. There will be no goodbye, only the sigh of a blizzard left echoing. Echoing further and further away until the echo becomes only memory. Would it be better to freeze, or to drown? The last time I thought about this I arrived at the conclusion that drowning isn’t as bad. I feel like I’ve died both ways. I’ve drowned on land with ease, without grace. So effortless. The panic attacks making me choke on air and I look around and everyone else is breathing just fine. I still have to remember to breathe sometimes. And to freeze is nothing at all. Blackness on all sides while trying to walk through the blinding fog. Frostbite feels like warmth compared to being numb. You can’t feel anything when you’re that far gone into depression. I often questioned my sanity because I couldn’t feel anything. To feel nothing at all when you exist is how I imagine freezing is somewhat like.

 

            And what would it be like to swim through the snow? Would it be like swimming disciplined laps in olympic sized pools? There was an olympic swimming pool in one of the recurring dreams that I would have as a child. A tropical garden bordered its edges, the silky shrubbery overflowing into the chlorine water. An old lady would always be standing outside of the pool, watching me. She wore a round, purple old-fashioned hat, a single flower tied with ribbon in the corner. Her eyes never left me, and as I swam I would grow so frustrated with her staring that I would get out of the pool and insist that she stop looking at me like that. Her sinister smile would always overwhelm her entire face. I grabbed her hat and flung it to the ground, but when I looked up, it was replaced by an identical hat. I grabbed hat after hat with the same result. After a while, I grabbed her face too, but it was just a mask and the same face would still be staring at me, unaltered. The same old lady would usually appear in another dream, the one where I would get lost in an old decaying Victorian house. It smelled of rotting wood, buried under the dust of an era lost. The house was a maze and sometimes I would stumble into a room filled with teddy bears, or collide with glowing ghosts that spun on a stage, orbiting like moons in an unlit room. I would wake up to my bedroom veiled in yellow light and peer out at the dawn.

 

            When I think about the place where my brother got lost, I wonder if somehow he got lost in the house that built our dreams. Had my family left him behind to fumble through the darkness of labyrinthine passageways with too many crossroads between corridors for him to navigate? Even with a map, just like me, my brother never did have a sense of direction.

​

 

***

​

            I assemble my childhood house from the wood of my memory, place sun in the broken windows, and color the blackened walls shades they never were. With splinters in my hands I rebuild an impression of the place where I was gifted with insanity and left to be shaped by the atmosphere of my dreams. I place the lines in the wood, the fingerprints left by children on the mist of the sloping living room ceiling, and an old Philadelphian piano sits in the front room where I let the notes call out because we never played it enough when we lived there. I wander through the hallway where I almost left behind my life. There aren’t any pictures hanging because most of the memories are too blurry to capture now. And at the end of the hallway, I see my old self again, hanging back at the threshold where my bedroom used to be, and I see the edge of the world of my youth, tipping over infinity. All at once I feel like I’m missing something, but at the same time I don’t feel anything when I look around. I don’t forget to lock all the doors before I leave because that’s what my father would have wanted.

 

            Towering over my silhouette I see the shadow of flames engulf the house, and I see the memory tear, shatter, and burst apart into pure white ash which blows into my eyes.

 

            The house of my childhood no longer stands on the hill it used to. I was actually a bit relieved to hear that it burned down. Childhood for me had been an underwater dream, filled with enchantment and a thick ignorant air. It was really that ignorance that ended up hurting me. I’d graduated from babyhood to the mentally frenetic age of infancy and advanced to the era of childhood when all you want to do is grow older.

​

***

     

            As the sun floats lower, I imagine that the ocean is the sky and the sky is the ocean, and what would that be like? The image of swimming in the clouds sharpens and becomes brilliantly clear in my mind. I glance over at the adults, and make my decision. I take my bucket with me so that I can look for sea shells and when I finally walk into the ocean, I feel a forgiveness from the heat as the cold seawater massages my legs. I dare to go a little deeper, until I’m up to my thighs and the ruffly skirt of my bathing suit strokes the surface of the water.

 

            In my grandmother’s eyes, the ocean is an exquisite blue beast, a creature to be respected but avoided. Being inside the beast, I still don’t understand the look in her eyes. The way the water swims in her vision, the way it moves, like golden snakes fiery with sunlight, snapping at the white sand. I can’t look at the ocean the same way she does. I feel not as though the ocean is tearing at me, but, instead, it is embracing me. I stand in the ocean, watching the endlessness of the horizon for what feels like a brief eternity.

 

             Suddenly, I feel myself being snatched back to land. Someone pulls on my swimsuit, spinning me around, and I see my grandmother’s face filled with little rivers of age deeper than usual. And in her eyes, I see a storm of terror.

 

            “Gabrie-Emma!” she cries. “The ocean was pulling you in and you didn’t even notice. That’s what the ocean does to you when you aren’t looking— don’t you see how dangerous that is?”

 

            I realize by how dry her hands are against my shoulders that I had gone out even farther than I noticed.

 

            “I told you, not one toe!” Tears tremble at the bottom of her eyes and she presses a hand to my cheek, pulling me into her. I can hear the fluttering of her heart. For as long as I have known my grandmother, she has always worn a necklace with a little boy angel, and I remember it swinging against the beating pulse of her chest, beads of water slipping off the surface of the metal. Her hands form a protective clasp around it; a prison of safety.   

      

            Later, I sit under a palm tree sulking. My cousins are dashing around in the shallow water, squealing with laughter. I sit on a stolen hotel towel, my knees pulled to my chin, and listen to everyone else’s laughter, begrudgingly accepting the fact that Grammy still thinks I’m too young to go into the water. I watch my grandmother with Victoria as she calls for her to toddle closer, catching her when she tumbles into the sand. I think about what it will be like when my sister can swim. I long for her to hurry and grow up so I won’t have to wait to swim alone anymore. At the same time, I wonder if my grandmother will ever learn how to grow young again.

 

            I stretch out under the shade, the palm fronds waving in the wind above me. The wind picks up and some sand flies into my eyes. I blink back tears, when I see something bright glint somewhere inside my sea shell bucket. I dump the contents out and begin rummaging around. I’m happy to see the assortment of colors and shapes when I notice a hole in one of the shells. I lift my hand to throw it away. The palm leaves quiver, letting in rays of sunlight that spill onto my raised hand. That’s when I see it. I finally know what my grandmother meant.

 

            It’s what lives on after you’ve drowned that we keep as treasures, strung about our necks in memory of what we’ve lost.