A Feast for St. Crispin, Part 4

The wisp reels him in. Its ethereal gravity was far stronger than blue-grey gauziness would suggest. He spirals in towards the lowering fire, dropping the wood beside it. He was confident the pile would allow completion of the ceremony. Sticks fed into the expanding maw of flames, the heat grows. The sun was disappearing behind the leaves.

A Feast for St. Crispin, Part 3

It begins with small things. Branch tips. Twigs, if necessary. Slabs of bark. Wind and weather have strewn the forest floor with them all. “Chop wood, carry water” the unspoken mantra of the amble, the stoop, and the grasp. Embraced by the nave of trees he finds hushed joy in the rasp of dried wood against his fingertips grasping the first stick showing promise. At the moment of contact, from deep in the trees comes the toktoktok-toktoktok of a woodpecker hammering on a tree. The patchwork canopy diffracts the staccato tapping into a call to prayer. He stops, sinking to his knees. Not much of a religious man, he nonetheless succumbed to the first devotion of the day.

The shock that hit him had been years in the brewing. The garden was no longer the refuge it once had been, its silence amplified by the disappearance of those who had accompanied him through the gates. There was no one with whom to keep watch. Peace of mind had become moonlight on broken water. Try as he might the pieces were ever slipping from his grasp, a prelude to the terror and confusion that would grip him later. He knew this now from the benefit of the scanning microscope that is hindsight.

The woodpecker hammers anew. A zephyr stirs leaves dampened by new-fallen tears. Of regret or sadness or loss, he did not know. That they fell brought solace as proof of life. To be alive is to feel, emotion as real as the crumbling leaves that disintegrated under his fingertips. Questions arose from the crackling litter.

To whom do you listen? Whose will do you obey? Who is your master?

Breeze ripples through the trees, feeling for all the world like whispers on his ears. The effect startled him. Spooked, he sprang to his feet with a racing heart. There was no way, he hoped, that someone or something could have followed him out here. The last people he had seen was a pair of hikers heading in the opposite direction, over three hours ago. They would most likely be at the trail head, he thought. More hammering from the woodpecker. The burst ends with a solitary, emphatic knock reminiscent of a gunshot. He took it as a sign to return to the fire. The sticks he gathered in his arms before turning to the thread of smoke winding through the trunks.

A Feast for St. Crispin, Part 2

He rose to his feet. Crackling in his joints echoed the crackling flames. To his ears the sound was another stitch in the universal fabric into which his existence was woven. The body, like fire, consumes to live. The price of existence includes the toll it takes on both. The flames offered themselves up as temporary axis mundi for this feast day in the woods. Ephemeral, fluttering, but temporal and true.

Metaphysical indulges aside, there was work to do. He stepped out in a languid amble spiraling anchored by the volute spring of the fire. Leaf litter crumbled underfoot, little brown mosaics shattered by the high notes of his tread. Fire warmth in the limbs fades into the coolth of October air seeping through shirt, jacket, and jeans. He amused himself with the folly of the forest as a Roman bathhouse. Leaving the fire behind on a foliate passage from caldarium to frigidarium, minus the shock of a dousing with water.

Having recently dropped the stones, his hands were empty. They tingled. The time had come to fill them with new fuel.

To be continued

A Feast for St. Crispin

The smoke rose to meet Heaven on October 25th, in the fifty-fifth year of his tenure on Earth. A warm beast of a campfire lay just beyond his feet. Sparks threatened his socks, but the therapy of the flames was too good to resist. Hard days of hiking had etched tattoos on his lower legs, in the form of bruises and blisters. Cramps, too. He considered that as he absent-mindedly massaged his left ankle and arch. New, not quite broken-in boots sat on the ground by his side. To the front firelight dappled a pair of old shoes that very nearly were in the embers. The proximity of fire to footwear did not bother him. Indeed, the closeness made him happy, seeing as it was integral to the point of sitting fireside on this Saint Crispin’s Day.

October seeped into his bones. Afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees striped the forest with honeyed gold and slices of dusk. Leaf litter tanged the air, undergirded with the memory of petrichor. He reveled in the boon of communion with earth, air, fire, and water. Modern science may have moved on to greater accuracy in classifying the world and loosening the grip of things elemental but they still held sway on his imagination. Balance was restored through the arboreal embrace of the forest. The proof was here and now.

More walking awaited. There was still wood to gather, provisions to secure. He reached for the boots, slipping them on. While lacing up, motion by the fire caught his eye. Faint threads of smoke were spiraling up from the toes of the shoes. “Whoah!” he barked, startling himself with the volume shattering the quiet of the woods. He snatched the shoes away. It was too soon to end the celebration. That would have to wait, when the sun was down and the belly was full. He finished lacing the boots, and stood. The fire needed the depth of the night to reach its full flower. Time to gather the fuel.

To Be Continued

Essence, Volume Zero

Memory and longing grabbed me by the nose on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, putting a tiny stutter in my step. The tourists may have thought I was tipsy, but I knew better. The sway of abrupt dislocation was triggered by an amalgam of scents wafting from a doorway. The drawing of a breath snatched me out of myself and into a memory palace far from my feet on the ground. A quick turn of the head to verify the source, a shake thereof for clearance, and then continuing on my way down to the harbor. This was break time. I would have no truck with ghosts, within or without me.

In the town where I work there is a spice shop around the corner from my office. It is on literal Main Street. I pass by it nearly every day during the work week. Good weather in the warmer months leads to a door often propped open. It is their custom to place a folding sign on the brick pavers in front, adorned with photos of the wares offered within. Aromas heady and alluring spill out into the sidewalk air. Most days I stroll past without much of a thought for it. But this Tuesday was different. The aromas hit hard and fast.

A different time. A different place. A different me. That person is not here now except in his own amber memories. I am reluctant to think of him now. How often does an island think of departed tsunamis, or a mountain dream of past earthquakes? I have no claim to the solidity of of such geographic stalwarts. but in our shared concerns it feels that we are brothers. Remembrance of the past does not equate to a desire for reliving it.

Mountains and beaches speak of singularities. In the collective memory of humankind, such features are “essential” in an ancient sense. They possess spiritual gravity. In our lives we know this because their proximity pulls at our hearts and minds. The great naturalist John Muir understood this, famously saying “The mountains are calling and I must go.” Substitute “ocean is” for “mountains are”, in particular, and it becomes supremely illuminatory.

The light was strong, the call was loud that ordinary Tuesday. I stood surrounded by both, with a nose full of memories. My heart beat slow. My pace matched it. I wandered off in search of an essence just beyond the edges of recall, wondering if it was written in Volume Zero.

Middens, Part 5 (At Rest)

Night air with its aroma of pelagic iodine brings with it a heightening of the senses. Hearing, touch, and sight in particular undergo an increase in their gain akin to dialing it up on a stack of amplifiers. Crickets in the dunes chirp with an intense clarity. My forearms rest on the desk. The burnished raspiness of the wood comes through as mild, electric warmth. By such solidity I can reassure myself that I will not plunge into the earth. I have an anchor as I continue to gaze out the window.

There is joy in bearing witness to magic. A silver ribbon bedecks the wine-dark sea as the moon begins its languid ascension into the sky. Breakers atomize into argentine drops, Poseidon casting coins onto a waiting shore. The scene spurs me to move. I am overwhelmed by the urge to walk the waterline and scoop up the bounty. The scraping of chair legs over planks ricochets around the cottage when I push back from the desk. Prickles of something akin to pain grind through the knees, the back, popping the joints. The sensation reminds me of stepping from the ocean into the embrace of a scratchy cotton towel. Slightly rough but offering tactile satisfaction. Standing feels good. I grab a flashlight from the shelf by the door and make my way outside.

Heat of the day clings tenuously to the siding and the sand. It is quickly being replaced as the night breeze swirls about. I know the path to the shore well enough to walk it on the dark, but moonlight makes a worthy accompaniment to the trek. Footsteps make their own music from the crunch and rasp of shells, sand, and dry grass. The sound is a balm, perhaps best enjoyed in the silence of a solitary walk when the mind can be fully present. As I approach the strand this current rendition is subsumed into the studied cacophony of the waves. It is a dialogue worth hearing.

I am at the tide line. The sand has that peculiar heaviness that comes from saturation. Density underfoot, with gravity. Seaweed scribes the beach with calligraphy untranslatable but intuitively understood. The vegetation is another shield, I find. A green rampart redolent of iodine, bedecked with remains of tiny creatures that did not survive the surf. There are pebbles, bits of wood, and shells. Clam shells in particular, with the odd fragment of whelk. The shells remind me of the oysters I had for dinner. Appetites come to mind. A shard of history surfaces in my mind.

Native peoples by the shore knew where to find sustenance. Ancient humans knew a good thing when they saw it. The consumption of oysters and the like over time led to the creation of huge mounds of shells, as we have discovered. Middens created by the survival imperative. Standing by the wrack, looking out over the moonlit sea, I am surrounded by the water, the walls of the cottage, the oysters in my belly: the middens between me and the world, keeping me alive and sane.

Middens, Part 4

To be at rest in the present day is becoming a luxury. Technology is convincing us that not only should we be connected, but we have to be connected. All access, all the time, as evidenced by our anxious search for recharging stations in public spaces. I marvel at the growth of my own disquiet while the battery percentage drops. Retreating into the dynamic serenity of dunes and breakers affords ample space to realize the disquiet is symptomatic of an affliction, one that is a creeping corrosion of peace of mind. Another weighty breaker pummels the shore. Emphatic maritime punctuation to my belated realization.

The horizon is the next nearest barrier, and it is far away. Its arc is faintly limned by the silver light of a moon yet to rise. My thoughts a mirror to the glow, I can feel a revelation creeping in on little padded paws. The hearth smolders. I will wait and see what the currents bring.

To Be Continued

Middens, Part 3

Sand, in the form of dunes, is the cradle here. I feel them swaddling the cottage. The day is on a gentle glide into night. Stars reveal themselves as burnished dimes embedded in a firmament of deepening indigo. I have lost track of how long I have been here in the chair by the window. Cool air redolent with aromas of iron and salt drifts though the casements. This is the scent of the world, of threads that bind me to it. It is an olfactory blanket which serves in part as shield against “dry land and its bitter memories”, to borrow a phrase from a favorite song.

The notion of shields has been hovering about my mind as of late. The world as it is seems to be on fire. Every day brings some new fresh hell of political chicanery, social disruption, or environmental chaos. The Internet alternates between being a crucial source of information and a digital dumpster. Having shields means having the means to preserve sanity and optimism. It means being able to endure. Satisfying our appetites, the hungers we feel, becomes it own form of shield. Eating comforting food, reading an engaging book, or laying eyes on a beautiful vista are all shield-building exercises.

Make no mistake here. These are shields, not walls. They aren’t meant to be permanent or static. Shifts occur as circumstances and needs evolve over time. It would be worrisome if this were not so. But what is true is the periodic need for protection, and thereby respite. Through a combination of temporal and spiritual means we seek and can find that respite when the world becomes too much and our minds overflow. Such is the appeal of this place by the sea, where the walls of civilization are not so close and the mind can expand into quiet, to actually hear itself.

It is getting dark. The line between the sea and the sky is near imperceptible. There is a lack of “something” there, yet that "nothingness" tells me here, I am safe. I am at rest. The profane is beyond the circle of light.

To Be Continued

Middens, Part 2

My hands are dry. Stillness compels me to hold them out before me, quivering under the influence of nerves and pulse. The unkindness of desiccated air has roughened the skin. Across the fingers is a skein of tiny cuts brought about by the raggedness of shells. Wavelets of pain flare across them as I flex my hands, calling attention to debts paid in order to eat. There is a clarity to this pain. It is a pain that I understand. Pain, hunger, joy: among the interlocking gravities exerting actions at a distance on the bodies we call home. They can take us out of ourselves but ultimately they bring us back. We ignore them at our peril.

Dinner settles in my belly. To experience such fullness is to experience modest grace. What matters is that we do not abide in ignorance of manifest hunger and the satiety which slakes it. I ponder this while watching a squadron of black-backed gulls tussling over the corpse of a fish down by the waterline. Sometimes the line between a gull and myself is nearly nonexistent, crossed as it is in the assuaging of hunger. In this way the gull and I understand each other.

The cottage needs room. Opening the casements ushers in the balm of salt water and warm sand, zephyrs like wee cats’ feet riffling the papers atop the desk by the windows. Papers. Journals. A smattering of pens. These too are tools used in the satisfying the appetites of mind and soul. The frequent exhortations of the page, as inscrutable as they are sometimes, bring me to the desk over and over again. This is imperative much like the need for an ocean view with time to contemplate the breakers in their infinite variety. Words and waves, the DNA of new stories using familiar elements.

A seventh wave thumps the strand. Vibrations from the impact work their way through the floorboards of the cottage to shiver my legs. The sound nudges me out of reverie. The afternoon is on its way to evening. Aureate light intensifies around the headland to paint the cottage in a warm gold sheen. This is precious time out here. The atmosphere is of a sort to have photographers scrambling for their cameras. Ordinarily I would do the same. But not today. Today the sea quietly suggests that today is not the day for the capturing of beauty, it is a day for experiencing it. This logic shall not be quarreled with.

If beauty has a purpose in life, surely it must be as a bulwark against the brutality and despair of the world outside ourselves. This thought puts its hands on my shoulders and gently pushes me down into the chair. Gulls call, shrill piercings that crack the sky and dissolve in the static of foaming water. I follow the fading cries into the sand.

To Be Continued

Middens, Part 1

The counter above the sink is disappearing under a Lilliputian scree of natural detritus. A crab shell. A pine cone. The dessicated corpse of a monarch butterfly. An ever increasing collection of oyster shells which echoes a trio of clam shells. In their turn they speak of the butterfly wings. All crowding up an earthenware bowl cradling a pair of silvery, greeny looking onions. Bulbs of garlic nestle up to the onions like penguin chicks. A scattering of garlic peels, snippets of allium papyrus, adorn the onions and the bowl. Doing the dishes, one cannot escape the sight of these gleanings from field, farm, and sea. Soft light reflecting from water and dune turn the cottage into a vitrine. I am among the objects on display.

I dry my hands on the rough cotton towel that hangs down the cabinet face. The hook from which it hangs was fashioned from a smallish cleat I excavated from the sand years ago, in the wake of a ferocious storm that had walloped the headland. Howling winds and horizontal rains ceding overnight to a stiff breeze scrubbing an azure sky punctuated by dandelion puffs of clouds. Walking the beach that day I spied the dull chrome tip jutting out of a ragged wreath of dulse. Brushing the sand off revealed the clear to be in good shape, so it came home with me.

Afternoon light fills the cottage. My hands wrap the towel around themselves as my peripatetic mind ponders the remains on the counter. I am reminded that the origin of the collection is fuzzy in my memory. The pine cone has been on the ledge for nearly two years, a curio brought back from a visit with family. The crab shell, perhaps from that trip as well. The clam shells I vividly remember saving from a particularly good batch of chowder I made in the fall, a brace of years ago. The butterfly? Date and time of collection is lost to history. But it is all a collection. A faded inspiration catalyzed the beginning of it. The intent, if it were ever to be coupled with action, was to create a series of still life photographs. Fading daylight reminds me that the intention has yet to be fulfilled. Another idea flitting away like the butterflies themselves.

Silence inhabits the cottage. It is not the aural sterility of anechoic chambers. Rather, it is the quiet of blankets and morning forests. There is the murmur of the waves, subdued. Accompanying them is the occasional cry of a kittiwake frisking about down by the waterline. The sounds reach me through a layer, gauzy on the ears. In this silence I recognize that my need to collect these avatars of nature has roots in a resting state denied me by current events, anxiety, and an addiction to information. The absence of input is a gentle reminder to step back from the chatter. It is not a theft of time to cradle a shell in the hands, trace the contours with a fingertip, and consider the threads that tie you to it.

Shell as tool. Shell as totem. Shell as container of food. These are the states by which I know them. The gathering and gleaning of these things is relief. The contemplation of these things is meditation. Either state is a frame of mind worth inhabiting. I know this having received revelation in the shucking of an oyster, and in the placid track of sunlight across the antediluvian scales of a pine cone.


To Be Continued

Gossamer Threads of Cast Iron

A book, a skillet, and a hungry belly were the elements of a personal chemistry uniting in an emotional solution inside my head, the wondrous precipitate of which was to realize the sheer quantity of history held in my possession. The cornbread was fresh out of the oven. Black cast iron skillet gripped in one mitt-clad hand, wire rack held in the other, I flipped the bread over and on to the rack. Perfect. Balance had been achieved and honored. The unctuous sheen of glossy black metal unmarred by stuck bits of cornmeal testified to things right and proper, transfixing me on the spot in the kitchen. Something deep, something ancestral spoke.

Dinnertime had come around as it usually did. It beckoned to me to put down the book* I was reading and head into the kitchen. Hunger took precedence over a fascinating look at food and the people who raise and harvest it in modern-day Appalachia. The "mountain south" was not exactly on my mind as I puttered about, assembling good eats via practice, sense memory, and prized artifacts of the kitchen. Yet its presence hovered about. It wore like a light mantle spread across my shoulders, full of comfort and guidance. The touch was in charge of my hands, though that was in no guise very clear. My back brain was working on it all the while.

I did not grow up in the mountains of Appalachia. But my mama's mama (G-maw) and her people did. G-maw was born in West Virginia, close to western Maryland. She was of the mountains, of a holler. Her extended family, as well as my maternal grandfather, had deep roots clustered in West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. G-maw was a teenager when the Great Depression hit. That in combination with mountain life could not have been easy. It certainly was educational in that it taught her survival skills and granted a kind of wisdom that serves one well in life when making the best of what you have in hand. G-maw carried that experience to her new home in southeastern Virginia where she took up with my grandfather and began to raise a family.

Some of this was on my mind as I read that book. The language used and the descriptions of places, people, and food occasionally jolted me with the shock of the familiar. I recalled mountain topography from the occasional visits in my youth to relatives in West Virginia. The hollers, the switchback roads, the great green womb of trees hunkering by the roadside. Summer evening in a place not awash in light pollution or noise. The notion of snacking on saltines adorned with thick slices of bologna. That last one jumped from the book's pages to gob smack me, as I recognized it right away. As a youth, I ate more than my share. As an adult, the habit faded into memory. What the book did was to bring it back in full force. G-maw used to eat that stuff, and so did my family. I learned it as a tradition even though it was not taught as such.

Growing up in southeastern Virginia near the ocean is literally hundreds of miles from the mountains. Figuratively speaking, the soils of each were (and still are) two homesteads looking at one another over a river of time. With the exception of college (five years in the Blue Ridge Mountains) and a stint in the Midwest (five years near Kansas City, Missouri) all of my life has been spent in easy driving distance of the coast. My rhythms of life, speech, and eating habits all suffused with the coastal South, even when I tried for many years to downplay or hide my roots. I did not know as a young adult that to practice that sort of self-deception plants the seeds of anxiety and doubt. Seeds that will bloom later. Yes, they will. They catch up to you.

That time was a constant search. A longing I could not explain or fulfill no matter how many questions I asked. On the one hand I was pursuing the American dream mandate of job-marriage-2.5 kids-and a minivan. On the other I was losing sight of where I came from, and by extension, where I wanted to be. Eventually I was at loggerheads with myself. I lacked the insight to find the peace of mind or sense of ease in my own skin that I so desperately wanted. Anxiety, emotional numbness, and a serious digestion related health problem forced me into a corner. My search for escape routes led me smack into the middle of food, eating, and truly learning how to cook. And not just cook for survival, but to cook for some peace of mind.

G-maw passed away while I was a college student. Some years later I received the gift of some cast iron skillets that had belonged to her. I knew little about cooking well then so I had no idea of the magnitude of this gift. Those skillets followed me to my first apartment out of college, my first new house, an apartment and a house as a divorced bachelor, through changes in relationships and geography, to ultimately reside in the kitchen of my apartment not far from the Chesapeake Bay. In all those years, I learned a few things. including respect for that cast iron. The skillets were faithful and true, devoted as dogs tend to be towards those who love them. They helped keep me alive.

They spoke to me, those skillets. For years I did not understand what they were telling me because I balked at giving credence to spirits. To my mind that would have been akin to surrendering to the demons of depression, self-loathing, and melancholy that periodically seized hold of my imagination. The difference lay in the tone and quality of the voices competing for attention. What the skillets were imparting was delivered at a steady, quiet pace. Respectful and attentive, never overbearing or toxic. It was the voice of history, of my family guiding me along a path I was not fully aware of taking.

This is where cornbread stepped back in that evening just last week. I was making it in the very skillet my grandmother had used to make fried fish and hushpuppies for me and her, when I was a kid, washed down with iced tea spiked with lemon. My recent reading in that book about mountain food and people pushed to the fore memories of my time with G-maw. A lush scent of crackling crust and toasted corn filled my kitchen to trigger a thunderclap realization of my ancestry. 

I am more a child of the lowland and the sea than I am of the timberline and the holler, this is true. But the mountains are in my blood, evidenced by DNA and ingrained habits as a human being. I make cornbread in that skillet because that is what my grandmother made in it. The action made sense to me like water makes sense to a fish: you can be surrounded by something that gives you life and be oblivious to it and its inherent sacredness. You know it by its absence. To come back to it is to know comfort and connection. In the instant I flipped that cornbread out of the skillet I dove back into that matrix. I felt my grandmother's hands on mine, saw her smile from somewhere up in mountains much closer than I imagined. I was home, knowing that my heart beats in two places connected by gossamer threads of humble cast iron, well-seasoned by history and love.

---

*Victuals, by Ronni Lundy

Disappeared - (Coda)

I left the river that day not free of melancholy wrought by the past, but with an understanding of how I could honor that feeling in my life without it overwhelming me. Realization was crystal clear that they are the disappeared, the people and places that I once knew now gone or altered beyond easy recognition. Rejected or removed, they cannot be forgotten. A factory building, a younger man, a sea of grass or grieving father: the heart holds a place for all of them. They had their habits. But there comes a time when past habits fail to serve us well in present living. We remember, not to relive the past but to learn from it. In this world, to learn is to grow. Growth enables the shedding of our skins in glorious, cyclical rebirth.

I have in my possession a collection of persons that no longer exist, except in the reservoir of memory, held to a bifurcated existence composed of pixels and neurochemicals. These outlines and shadows etched by experience into silicon and grey matter, writ plain on the heart. They are installed in a personal Hall of Memory curated by my future self, to consult in times of need.

Disappeared (Part 18)

Awake and breathing with tendrils pushing into the soil, slow and sure. Sycamores along the banks of the Patapsco spoke of this as their daily meditation. To hear such missives requires a discipline for stillness. One has to engage with disengagement. Disengagement from the yokes of modern life which decree and direct what you do and when you do it. The yoke could be a job, a phone or tablet, or a machine. The medium matters less than the message when it comes to the potential for distraction. What is distraction? That which prevents the soul from dealing with the truth of the life surrounding its container. Distraction is anything which prevents or inhibits the accommodation of grief, the reveling in love, the savoring of contentment. In short, distraction is anything that gets in the way of that which feeds the soul and therefore prevents growth or understanding.

Walking along the Patapsco River one morning, in the quiet radiance of my daughter’s presence and not long after our arrival back east, I looked up at the sycamores I had so long admired and had so long missed. Their trunks looked little changed from the last time I had seen them. The trunks shone in the sunlight where it filtered through the leaves. The limbs resplendent in shades of gray wolf and marble dust tinged faintly with ambient green. They stood as quiet witness to our presence. Our phones had been left in the car. Perhaps the trees knew this, and respected that choice. Space had opened up for us to talk of many things. Silence, too, had its place. My heart could tell because my mind was calm. The trees, water, and my progeny were the catalyst for a serenity not experienced in years.

What does it mean that the river is still there? Everything. Whether an internal reality manifested as a vision in the mind’s eye or the external reality of water and stones before the senses, it is this riparian presence that has provided a singular constant in a tumultuous cataract of years. From a place such as it I was figuratively born. To a place such as it I literally returned. Strolling by the Patapsco that morning, a comparison became inevitable between it and the rivers of my most recent experience. The Missouri and Mississippi surely possessed more mud, width, and mythology than the humble river I thought of as mine. But what those two stalwarts of American iconography did not have, and possibly never will, was a hold on my heart. Too little time spent in the company of the Mississippi, I guess. The Missouri and I never became friends. I walked its banks a few times and crossed it more than I can recount, but I never felt accepted. I never felt comfortable. Whether that says more about me than about the river is something I may never know. The Patapsco, on the other hand, has always been quick with an embrace. Humble, quiet, content.

The following months became a sine wave of hope and despair, calm and stress. Adjustments to a new life in a once familiar place soaked up extraordinary amounts of time and energy. This life was a new bike. I knew its theory but not its practice. Loneliness, job stress, and family emergencies extracted from me more than I had to give. I became broken and withdrawn. Existence became a question for which there was no clear answer. A demanding fall slipped into a discontented winter as I flailed about searching for proof that the decisions that had led me here were the right ones.

Alone in my apartment one Saturday in the following spring, embedded in a span of directionless free time, I felt my heart fluttering while my mind raced. The walls were too close. I needed to be out. Water, rocks, and trees chorused their siren call. Soon I was on the road to the river flowing through my mind and in the real world of the valley not so far away. The river held some answers. I heard them in the rush and burble that day while perched upon a boulder near the flow. Meditative deep state has never come frequently or easily to me. That day was different. Within minutes my eyes unfocused. Somewhere inside the heart of a blue whale stirred, with its tardo pulse and stately rhythm. Breathing became a languid zephyr stirring the leaves. The membrane between Me and Everything thinned and slipped. I felt the river in my nerves, heard it in my ears. What it said was that all the experiences of the past few years transpired to bring me to the present, this here and now. All the pain, all the joy, all the in between put me where I was meant to be. In the words of Ortega y Gasset, I truly was “myself plus my circumstances”. The whole was truly greater than the sum, I was going to be okay.

I came to, dappled by sunlight dripping through the leaves. How much time had passed was unknown to me. The voices of the past melded and morphed into the sound of water over stones. Standing up, I brushed off my pants, took a satisfying breath, and walked back into the world as the person that I was faded into the shadow of the person I had now become.

Disappeared (Part 17)

I awoke the following day with the taste of ash on my tongue. Sometime in the night smoke tinged my river dream. The tiny lanterns of fireflies flitting about became embers. The teeming rubicund lights were languid in their downward drift, snuffed out by the ribbon of black mercury that was the water. In my dream, I had shipped my oars so that I could rest. The water was calm but moving steady with no rapids. Ahead I could see the beginnings of sunrise touching the horizon with fingers of peach and gold. Behind me the sky was tinged with red of a different hue, one that spoke of tragedy and loss. Perhaps by stopping to rest the wind had caught up to me, bearing on it the ashes I sought to outrun. The oars dipped into the river. I opened my eyes.

The fire behind and the ocean ahead held us in thrall, a chunk of iron suspended between opposing colossal magnets. Ambition to escape the former and embrace the latter would be the force to liberate us from stasis. My daughter was oblivious to my eager anxiety. The stakes were different for her. She was on her way back to a home she never left. I was on my way back to soil and sea that had never truly left me but to which I would require reacquaintance. While not being a religious man, it struck me that living the reinvented life ahead would be a relearning of the words to a forgotten hymn. Coast, shoreline, river and bank, the houses of worship I forgot I needed. Perhaps it was no coincidence this was the third day of my revival.

Road music. The hum of tires on the asphalt becomes the slither of water along the hull. Fair weather hitched a ride, ambling along as the car nosed its way through Ohio and West Virginia. Lunch in a chain sub shop somewhere in Pennsylvania, while I did not know it then, would be the most memorable thing about the last leg of the trek. There was silence between my progeny and I. This silence was not born of malice or personality fatigue. No, more due to road weariness and anxious anticipation of a landing at the end of the asphalt.

I become the salmon and trout, alewife and blueback, returning to natal rivers from whence we entered this world. Watercourses of deep memory no longer the same but still homes not forgotten. Trees may have fallen on the banks. The rocks abide in the currents. Somewhere upstream it is possible that the riparian channel has shifted course, or in a tectonic shift of circumstances perhaps an old dam has been removed. The years like tons of silt washed downstream by the inexorable pressure of time, of change. I stared down the dirt and debris rushing past under the impetus of the hydrological cycle of my soul. The river of my birth was not swirling about my knees but it was close enough to smell its crystalline, metallic tang. Like my marine cousins, I was navigating by memory and deep structures impossible to see by direct observation.

Memory and deep structures served us well, terminating this cross-country hegira by the quiet parking of our car in a hotel parking lot. Warm summer air, gravity with humidity, flooded the vehicle upon opening the doors. Upon the breeze was a faint hint of iodine and salt, or so my weary senses told me. That the Chesapeake Bay waited just over the horizon was not lost on my psyche. Green waves rolled over my head as I floated just below the sunlit surface. It would not be long now.

Saltwater and smoke are different beasts, with very different and sublime aromas. After the trials of the year behind, my heart chose brine over ash. This became clear as my daughter and I left the hotel to search for dinner. Tightness in the belly slipped away as I stood outside breathing deeply of air which had recently slipped over water instead of grass. My heart throbbed in systolic and diastolic sympathy with waves now not so far away. Blood ebbed, blood flowed. Its pause and rush filled my ears with the sound of breakers caressing the shore.

That night sleep came swiftly. Of the dreams that paid a call, I remember nothing except for standing before a cottage door, wondering if I still had the key.

Disappeared (Part 16)

Sunrise in St. Louis. A new day begins within sniffing distance of the Mississippi. It is not lost on me that we will cross it when we leave the city. The big river psychically holds a place in the collective consciousness as “where the West begins”, especially to those who were born, raised, and spent most of their life on the east coast. It is a myth, mostly, but one that hovered in the back of my mind for years. Years, that is, until I spent some years living in Kansas. The Mississippi River may have been where the West began centuries ago, but these days it is more a state of mind rather than a reality.

That state of mind was on my mind when the wheels hit the road on the William L. Clay Bridge over the river. This was not where the west begins. This is where the next phase of my life, my eastern life redux would begin. Big water interposed between me and the wreckage, the fire, and the memories from the land of Oz. The short term goal was simply to make it to Ohio. Columbus, Ohio, to be exact. Never before had I been there, never had a reason to visit. It was a new day. The circumstance of distance made anointed Columbus as the mid-journey stopover, a place to catch breath and lay our heads.

King Pepe meows and places his front paws on the dashboard. The sun lights up his face, illuminating his eyes with tawny gold. The figurehead cat will soon lose interest in the road ahead. He will curl up in the back with that luxurious ease that felines possess. I envy him. He rests, I drive. My daughter keeps herself entertained via the smartphone, although we chat and like about memes and the weirdness of the internet. This is comfortable, this is good. This is the first road trip involving just the two of us. At first it was a bit awkward. My time in Kansas had afforded little chance for chance conversation, just us. But heart memory served me well, and we found common ground with broken ice. For the first time in years, I felt like a father in practice rather than just name. If my hands hadn’t been on the wheel I might have wept. But the kid could not drive and we had miles to go before we slept.


The river flows into Illinois, cross-wise to the Mississippi, a flow of striped asphalt bathed in the hum of traffic. Something happened when we crossed over. Was that a door slamming or a curtain falling? The horizon behind shifted and blurred. The undersides of the clouds no longer carried the tinge of flames below. The air itself smelled sweeter without the tang of smoke. Our vessel found its head, and I was content to let it follow the ribbon of pavement into the east. Illinois rolled away under the wheels. Indiana was more a chronometer than a place. Miles became blur, hypnotic, calming. Travel as a fugue state that brought peace of mind. Not so long ago I would have paid cash money to find that peace. My gratitude was palpable to have achieved it on the road.

A change in the weather greeted us upon crossing the border into Ohio. Clouds gathered overhead, storm curds gravid with the threat of thunderstorms. They chased us down the highway to catch up with us as we neared Columbus. The skies cracked open to turn the interstate into a log flume ride in a particularly hectic amusement park. The car did not so much roll into the parking lot of the hotel as it floated. Still, the deluge had not saddled me with the usual grouchiness that afflicted me when bad weather complicated my life. Quite the opposite. The rain was heavy, the road slick and uncertain. These things were easily handled. The water itself soothed and cleansed, whispering good things to the soul. Rain and river were carrying me away from the damage of the recent past into a future uncertain but full of promise. What the water told me is that the hurt is real but so is the healing.

As we checked in to the hotel, the storms moved on. We left our bags in the room, and went in search of dinner. Sunlight peeked through a hole in the curtain of the sky. White gold rays coruscated over billows of dusky purple. Omen? I do not know. Later, over ice cream, my daughter and I agreed it was beauty. Surely this boded well for the morning, and another good day on the road. That night I slept well, dreaming of a river flowing into the sea. I could hear the waves and it sounded like home.

Disappeared (Part 15)

“Seeker knelt at the edge of the prairie, retching his guts out with volcanic intensity. Slow poison and spiritual exhaustion had taken their toll. His arms trembling with the violence of the possessed, sheer force of will kept his head from dipping forward into the foulness polluting the ground. Behind him, roiling smoke besmirched the horizon of the sea of grass that once held his heart. Seeker could feel the heat even at the miles he had put between he and it. He spat. Pain radiated from the stone behind his breastbone.”

Those words were written over a year past, chronicled here in a grim story of an interior movie playing in a weary head. It was not a movie suitable for children. Censor and critic that I am to myself, my daughter would not be viewing it now, perhaps never. She was not quite ready, in my estimation, to know the Seeker. Ah, no. That is not quite correct. In my estimation I was not quite ready to reveal myself as the Seeker. The journey east would begin in hope, not despair.

Daddy and daughter a reverse Lewis and Clark. We loaded up our wheeled canoe on a warm July morning with St. Louis, Missouri as the destination on the first leg of this expedition. Our cat, King Pepe, served as the bobcat analogue to me as the Seeker. He was in much better shape than the cat in the movie and was not long for his carrier once we hit the highway. He would have made a good figurehead for our vessel if high velocity wind and common sense had not dictated that we not speed down the road with a cat strapped to the hood.

Off we went in a curious mix of trepidation, curiosity, and (in my case) melancholic relief.

In the rear view is a horizon smudged with smoke. The sun merges with the orange line of the horizon, liquefying itself among the flames consuming the grass. The city is a hologram of fading light as the wheels find their lead on the river of asphalt leading out of town. My daughter does not see the flames. I am grateful we will not discuss the burn.

Our first wicket is St. Louis, Missouri. Gateway to the West, as it fancies itself. The gateway will now operate in reverse, a door is swinging the other way. The road rolls up behind us across the state. Upon arrival, the city greets us with indifference and humidity. King Pepe awoke in a nervous state. Saucer-eyed, he struggled a bit during the effort to get him into the cat carrier. There was no such angst upon opening the hatch. The cat quickly sized up the hotel room, finding a perch on the windowsill looking out over the St. Louis night. I felt some kinship with the animal. I realized I had been shallow breathing, almost sipping the air, on the entire drive across Missouri. Setting down my suitcase loosened something in my torso, and my breath came out all in a rush. Shaking, dizzy, my shoulders rose. I gulped the air. For the first time in days, it did not smell of smoke. If anything, I detected a faint mineral aroma that spoke of cool water rushing over stones.

In the east the river carried on as befitted its nature. Or should I say rivers? Duality was present. A river existing in my mind and the river existing in the corporeal world. The vision was in my head, this movie of double exposures, simultaneously playing, but slightly off congruency. I heard things, too. Water over stones, leaf litter rustling in the breeze. Bird calls. In the spaces between burbles and trills I could hear the faint susurrus of my heartbeat. This is the earth reminding us that we are alive, and gratefully so. The comfort to be had in such moments is amplified in its power to sustain.

The Mississippi River lies not far from the hotel. Its presence can be felt even when out of eyesight. It may be that the river’s voice could be heard without the noise of the city constantly talking over it. Also, there is the arch. The Gateway Arch looms over downtown, a silver parabola etched against a sky of purplish anthracite. My daughter wishes to see it up close, as do I. This may be the last time either of us will be here. Timing and history are not lost on us. There must be a way to carry a positive parting memory of this time in the heartland.

We trekked through the streets and across a frenetic major arterial road. It was surprising amount of traffic for being later in the evening. Overhead across the way loomed the arch. An alien obelisk of stark light on metal. I looked forward to garnering some good pictures once we arrived at the base. The riparian aroma, fecund and earthy, wafted off the Mississippi, filling the night and our lungs. The knot in my diaphragm loosened up, I think in anticipation. But it was not to be.

Construction and renovation were underway at the base of the monument. Fencing stood between us and getting within Frisbee tossing distance, never mind actually touching the arch. My progeny huffed a sigh of disappointment. So did I. The metallic taste of sly irony spread across my tongue to coat the back of my throat. We had come far with open hearts and earnest hopes that would not be fulfilled. This was a familiar feeling. To my credit I took it in stride. My daughter did the same. This was minor. This was a trifle. The road still lay open, with promise of its own. The brilliance of the arch convinced me of it. We took some pictures, my daughter and I, then turned our backs to the river to make for room and sleep. The river before us would be crossed in the morning, and the gateway would fulfill its legacy.

Disappeared (Part 14)

Morning light fills the erstwhile cryosleep chamber otherwise known as the bedroom. I contemplate the Newtonian physics of a life in motion, and how for the longest time I preferred my body at rest to remain in that condition. Inertia made things simpler, less strenuous than it would have been to overcome depression, fear, and cowardice. To stay at rest is the soul’s insulation against facing the realization that it has no self-esteem, no self-belief. In turn this paves the road to personal hell, accepting estrangement and isolation rather than facing fear to assume command of life. In the cool pearly light of that summer morning after returning from the east coast, I decided to face fear and shine light on my unknown. I took the job. The portage over the mountains would begin whether or not I was ready.

A low murmur becomes a muffled rasp. The muffled rasp becomes a loud rush and gurgle. It is the unmistakable voice of the rapids, out of view but not far off. Riverbank views bend through the parallax induced by the acceleration of the current. What changes in the sound of life! A mild Doppler effect, side effect of speed, provides anxiety and amusement. Holding in place on the shore is less of an option now that change has taken hold. The river will tell me what to do. Whispers among the eddies and rocks cajole me to have faith, hold tight, this is in your blood and bones. There is a new future unfolding here on this silver ribbon under the star-speckled dome of the sky. It will bloom as it should if I am patient and careful.

This current life is not all poetry and speculation. Obligations beget pragmatics. Sliding down the slope of summer brings me to a grand visit from my daughter. It is her long summer break. She will be spending a big chunk of that with me. In my new place where I am alone. I will not tell her of the loneliness and desperation to which I succumbed in this funeral palace. Instead we will live in the moment. We shall make plans. We will spend time enjoying the company of the other. Most importantly, we will make this life change a golden opportunity for adventure. It is rare in my experience to take slack time and turn it into a cross-country road trip with someone you love. But this is exactly what we shall do. Come the right time, and we will point the car eastward, following the highway and urging my possessions to catch up. While waiting for that to happen we will see something of the world between the middle of the country and the coast upon which we both were born. It is for the road, and life.

Meanwhile, the sparks that had flown had nestled themselves in the Sea of Grass, a fulfillment of wind and combustible nature. Tiny djinns attired in robes of pale gold and orange danced among the parched stalks, sending plumes of thin smoke up into the desiccating air. I could taste it in my many dreams of escape.

So it began. Fire on the prairie makes the animals run fast. I awoke one morning from a fever dream with my legs already in motion. My kid was coming for a visit. I was trying to catch the boomerang, get things under control, and have the bow pointed to the east.

Disappeared (Part 13)

Flashback. It is summer. My first one alone after twenty-plus years of being in a relationship. I am on a footbridge that crosses a stream adjacent to the apartment complex into which I had recently moved. Beside me is my daughter, who is gazing intently into the water below the bridge. Water bugs dimple a surface reminiscent of quicksilver where the argentine sky is reflected through gaps between the crowns of trees lining the banks. My progeny is casting twigs and leaves into the stream, playing a game of “Pooh Sticks” while we pass the time on a lazy day. The uncomplicated smile on her face engraves itself in my memory. It will come back to me years later as I stand on a different bridge, watching a faster current in a stolen moment between adult obligations. It will, in turn, make me smile.

Spending money I possessed momentarily for a shot at money I was currently without. Standing on the edge of the ledge, rappelling rope in hand, nothing but air below was what I dreamed. Flying into Baltimore was the reality, a blitz trip of a visit with less than two days on the ground. I ate well that night of my arrival, with good friends. A full belly does wonders for the outlook. Later that night, in the warm submarine light of a neighborhood bar, the bartender tempted me with the possibility of another fine drink. But recent history and prudence made the right decision. I contented myself with chewing a lonely ice cube sheathed in the memory of gin and lime. Clear head and a calm stomach for the morning, I said. There would be time for another drink later, whether in commiseration or celebration remained to be seen.

Good fortune was in the house. Rain dampened the day but the interview went well. It was shortly thereafter that I was offered the job. I nearly fainted with relief and gratitude. A sizable chunk of the future snapped into focus.

The river flowed on, a calm path into an arboreal canyon. This quicksilver thread stitched onward to the ocean, lit by the soft torch of promise. Sparks flew, carried far away to land among the sere undulations of the Sea of Grass. The terrain there had been sliding into aggressive desiccation for months. Lawns, trees, prairie grass had all assumed a cloak of dull brown that could not be unseen by my heart. There was rain, occasionally, that the ground seemed too weak to absorb. Perhaps spirits were at work, supernatural guides working overtime to convince my battered soul that to uproot was to return to life.

What is the proper name for the plate tectonics of one’s life? How to measure the drift of one’s continent of the soul? Can these things be quantified? I found myself lying awake in the small hours of the morning with those questions ringing in my head. The pent-up energies of frustration and helplessness slipping the leash as the possibility of positive, profound change materialized for me. I was nearly hollowed out by the breakneck rush of metaphorical air from my mental lungs, gasping with relief. It was clear that the ground was moving. With the ground on the move, at such pace, surely that meant the river would soon change its course.

I have often wondered if green, growing things worry about their roots. When the ground is drowning or it quakes in the grip of seismic nightmares, no tree can sleep easy in its bed. A loosening of the grip trembles its way from the tips to the crown, the heaviest of which is usually the first to fall. If my life had an advantage it was that it was not a tree. It was something smaller. Something closer to the ground. Any roots I had in the Sea of Grass were not thick and deep. These roots were sunk just enough to anchor me against the small floods and heavy winds of life. Thus, I kept on station just enough to buy some time. And now that time was in the bank.

Disappeared (Part 12)

“Too thick to drink, too thin to plow”. So Mark Twain supposedly said about the Missouri River. I cannot attest to Big Mo’s drinkability, never having attempted such a foolish feat. I can say, having dipped my hands in it, that it is definitely too thin to plow. In all my crossings of that river I cannot recall a single instance where the water ran clear. Clarity is not in its nature. Turbidity as a feature of swift moving water served as template and metaphor for my state of mind before arranging my uprooting.

The scramble began to navigate out of the figurative hole in which I found myself while finding a literal place in which to live. Slim resources, low energy, heavy obligations: a perfect storm. No longer welcome it what had been my home, the circumstances had me on the rack. Confusion and hurt became the order of the day. The river seemed to be all rapids and no calm water. The year dragged on, finally turning as I shivered my way through life.

There was nothing left to do but treat this river the same way one survives a rip current in the ocean. Don’t struggle against it. Go with it. Keep yourself parallel to the shore. Survival is predicated on waiting it out while keeping the head above the water. Much of the ensuing months are blurry to me. Thinking became a luxury, indulged in rarely. Survival in a practical sense, fulfilling the obligations of food and shelter, absorbed my existence. Work was meager, but treasured for its ability to distract. I moved into an apartment that was too big. It was there that I began to make my way back to shore.

It should be said that my float trip down this river was not in total isolation. There were life preservers in the form of good friends, in the heartland and on the coast, who bucked me up. Offers of material support, advice, and companionship were gratefully accepted. Without them the journey would have been truly unbearable. One of the best pieces of guidance I received as I was sorting through the wreckage was the observation that “You know where you need to be.” This was offered at a time where my heart was deciding where my home really existed. The answer was to back on the coast, closer to my daughter and to the waters that flowed in my veins.

Where to be? A simple problem statement illuminating a complicated, seemingly impossible solution. The days were haunted by the specter of the lack of money. Photography was barely getting me by but the burn rate was not slowing down. The situation was unstable. The coast was calling me, infiltrating my dreams, but most mornings were a slow awakening in front of a stone wall at the back of a dead end tunnel. My imagination was failing.

Current flows ever on. A ceaseless advance of muddy, roiling water throughout the day and night. Once the hapless swimmer learns enough to avoid drowning the mind turns to thoughts of endurance. Swim, swim, long enough to find some solid ground in whatever form it presents itself. This river is known for its formation of sandbars. Even a patch of that tremulous ground would be welcome to an exhausted soul. To the extent I could keep my head above the waterline I kept a lookout as far out as possible. Nothing could be done to rectify the lack of a crow’s nest from which to scout the water ahead. I had my fingers crossed my life would not end up like the steamboat Arabia in 1856, pierced through by a tree snag on the Missouri River, sunk, and buried in the mud for over a hundred years plus thirty two more. The metaphor was full of savor, though: fully loaded ship traveling at speed rams something lurking below the surface and goes down fast. Bitter laughter is its own meat.

If you try hard enough you might succeed at growing gills. Learn to breathe underwater, perhaps. Breathing to survive and searching for anything to halt the slow sinking to the bottom. I wondered if there might be a patron saint of Neutral Buoyancy. Even if no such being existed I prayed to it, as a salve for hopelessness on nights where the ceiling pressed down like the an inverted ocean canyon. This bought precious time. Time to sleep, when I could not act.

Opportunity knocked in one of those peaceful interludes. A good friend back east brought to my attention a possibility of employment. A chance to reenter a career edifice I had very nearly abandoned. All I had to do was consign myself to moving a thousand miles again and accepting a commission to Captain an office chair. This of course hinged on getting an offer, but the decision to fly out for a chat took no time to make. Some good friends offered up a room in their house so I would have a place to stay on the trip.

Flood water dropped below its crest with this slackening of the current. The river advertised new openings for those in the business of riverine cartography. New ground revealed itself as the meniscus shroud of water dropped from the shoulders of sand bars that did not exist before the storms. What this receding of the waters lacked in the red-hot drama that might be evinced by a submarine volcanic eruption, it made up for in with the formidable certitude of inevitable sedimentation. To the exhausted swimmer even a small convexity of drier land is gratefully received. I crawled. I grew new legs. Trembling they were, but grateful to stand on solid ground. I flew back east with something akin to hope flickering in my heart.

Disappeared (Part 11)

T. S. Eliot posited in “The Waste Land” that April is the cruelest month. It is has taken many years for me to have an inkling of what he meant, but it has taken a back seat to July (with an overlap into August). Thirteen years before in the midst of what became a summer in Hell, I lost my first daughter then my son. Victims of premature birth into this world by horrible misfortune, circumstances which I believed would never repeat themselves. I was not completely wrong, but not right enough.

I sat at my workstation that day near the end of July 2016 engaged in the mundane and prosaic. Press the buttons. Make the changes. Register the fact that I heard a blood curdling scream rose from the basement bedroom. Register the fact that the scream was repeated. Time shifted into slow motion, get up from the chair, what was that, run for the door at the top of the stairs and she is sobbing and wailing, turn the corner at the foot of the stairs into the bedroom. The nightmare replays itself.

The baby is still. Pallid. Unmoving. The mother is sobbing. The father is stock still, staring. I’m staring, too, in iced disbelief. This cannot be happening. But it is, here and now. I touch the baby to feel, to show myself that she is only sleeping. Coolness under my fingers grabs that hope by the scruff of the neck and slams it into the walls. I come to realizing I am on the phone. Help. We need help. Ambulance is called. The police are called. The grandmother is called. The air fills with the sounds of sirens and clamors and choked voices trying say what happened. The day became a smear of tears and tragedy.

I loved someone once. I loved more than one someone once, in different ways for different reasons. It is a labor of a higher intensity to pretend a relationship is not different after succumbing to the multiple gravities of death as an obscenity. Our eyes saw too much, our feet stood on unrecognizable ground. The heart of Hell beckoned once again. Given the circumstances it surely surprised no one that I began to sink faster than I could swim.

Rivers flood when the snow melts in the spring. This is somewhat predictable. It is the random heavy storms that cause the most damage. Torrential rains dumping more water faster than the channels can handle until the banks are overflowing and the roads are underwater, this too is a feature of the natural world. Yet when it happens it seems unnatural. It is outside of everyday experience.

Back east a flood took over the historic part of a town in which I used to live. Torrential rains moved in and turned the Main Street into a destructive, deadly sluice as it claimed two lives and ruined numerous businesses. The street was shut down for close to two months as owners and residents worked to put their lives and livelihoods back together. Quantam entanglement of a morbid stripe used the threads of tragedy to stitch together the sundered halves of my lost soul. My head and heart could not take it.

The river of myself succumbed to a 500-year flood. The dam holding the reservoir of my relationship crumbled, cracked, turned to rubble under the onslaught of failed communications, emotional turmoil, and the selfish aggression of depression. My body finally realized alcohol was sinking hooks in me. I sought answers and knowledge only to discover the medication I was taking had a side effect of triggering deeply unhealthy urges to drink in some individuals, of which I was one. I fell into the gauzy morass without realizing it. I desperately wanted to get out of it. I sought help. While that help slowly began to get me back on the right path, it did no good in repairing the fractures in our hearts. The situation worsened to the point where I was given an ultimatum to move out of the house. No recourse, no exploration, no retrieval. I had been clinging to the sides of the chasm, but this was the emotional equivalent of fingers smashed by the striking of a colossal hammer.

Somewhere in that smear of time, the person I once had loved confessed to me the lie that had underpinned my life decisions. Months ago on that Mexican beach I had been told “Yes” to my marriage proposal, but the real answer was “No”. ‘Yes’ was a falsehood prompted by a spectacular failure of her emotional honesty and courage, in not telling me the truth because it would have hurt too much.

So much time wasted in months of living a lie. The skies opened up, torrents came down, the river became a monster washing me out to a faraway sea. With no other apparent options, I gave in to the current.