A Migration on Hold
What I feared most has happened. From the first troubled week I spent on this island, I could sense what was coming. Even then, I knew that I would, despite myself, remain past my intended return. I could feel the tug of this island, and I knew without knowing that the decision to leave would not be mine to make.
And how many times have I heard it since arriving here? The stories of those who came to visit with intention, and how nothing but a neglected ticket came of that intention.
They are the “accidents” of the island, and from what I’ve gathered, it includes almost every person has migrated here. I must have known somehow that I would become one of them. I could sense the fall before it happened, and I crossed the threshold of reason and let the island do with me what it does to those who are desperate for something else to take over.
How could I have known in what form that force would come? I could feel God listening when I sat on my knees and begged and begged, but I was prepared to wait, months, years, whatever it took for love to find its complicated way back to the cavity in my chest. How could I have known then that it was only a matter of days, and that it would arrive on the day before I had planned to leave? How could I have known that, in the end, I had it in me all along to delay my return and to consider, despite the pounding impulse, the prospect of staying?
Before the Memory Fades
I write to remember… the nights beneath the shooting stars, the albino horse that kissed him the first time we met, the rain, the fire by the shore break, the jeep stuck in the ditch and the miles walk back. I write to remember the evenings on the hammock, his black Sheppard, the tiny bed we share, the quiet, tender Sundays indoors, the long kisses that speak…
I write to remember the cliffs by the gated lighthouse that looked nothing like a lighthouse…the times he held me against the wall, the times he walked me back home in the middle of the night, the times I left at dawn.
And when he looks at me, he looks to the right of my face, his green eyes bent in the shade of what looks to me like sadness. There’s pleasure, too, and disbelief, because beyond all the sentiments marching across the weathered roads of our hearts is the unanticipated shock that after a year of pain and loss and unimaginable suffering, there could be something good that comes our way, and that perhaps after all the bullshit and dirt-caked luck, we may still find something worth rising for in the morning.
And it could be that all the agony that came to us before our meeting had been delivered with the intention of making our discovered love all the more precious.
Still, the end of the year is drawing closer, and I’ll have to leave soon, though I’ve got a feeling I’ll be begging the island for permission. I can’t speak of leaving seriously. Not yet. The tongue goes on talking about it only out of habit, but the heart doesn’t believe it anymore. It feels impossible, unusual. Suddenly, leaving makes very little sense to me. Of course, there’s the stubborn, ambitious part of me that says no real work can be done on this island, and that my dreams require more serious places and company, but there’s the little girl in me that has just come back this year and she, not I, decides where to go. It was her, not I, that made the call to the airline. It was her, not I, that said yes to a man when no made far more sense. It is her, not I, that decides where the hours go. When I tell her to write, she sits on the ground, sorts through her shells, the fabric, the paints, and I let her, not because I have learned enough from the past, but because I no longer have a choice.
I have no idea what I’ve drawn myself into, and what, with all the more time I am choosing to remain, I am getting myself deeper and deeper into. There is love, yes, but something else too. There’s a part of me that has come with him and to know her I have to know him, and to stay with her I have to stay with him…
I haven’t slept much in the past weeks. My thoughts are hard to come by and even harder to get down. When it comes, it comes. When it doesn’t, I wait. In rare moments, everything appears so clearly, so simply. I could hear the sound of silence, the lapping tides, the night frogs, the far bullets. He is there beside me, and everything goes quiet and I feel a presence I’ve never felt before. It’s like she comes to me from the sea and sits between us and it stuns me into silence. I can only think how unfamiliar it feels. I can’t describe it… this presence with the other that most of us only meet when it’s too late or when we’ve crossed over the threshold and are no longer a body with form and shape. Some nights, it feels as if she’s stepped inside me, and the false “I” is as dead and gone as driftwood in a bonfire. There’s no private war, no nagging guilt, only the essence of who I am and who he is, together, each of us equally stunned by what the other has shed, and in shedding, made room for the true self that yearned for it and could not find it before.
