Stones

I'm sitting in the bookstore trying to grab ahold of the words before they leave me. The game club of Maryland is gathered here, and the bookish men and women at the  table next to me are playing a card name whose name I can't remember, even though I recognize it on sight. I once sat across the table from someone and learned to play it myself, wondering why I was there when it made no sense to be, beyond the fact that I have a tendency to put myself in risky places when I stubbornly and often stupidly feel it's worth it.

Names dance across my screen - words and facts and possibilities that I'm trying to file alphabetically under what makes sense, whittling them down into a decision that lets me sleep at night, even if I have to sell my car or walk strange city streets alone and mostly unafraid to do it. Sometimes I don't think I can, that I'll just let the waves of the next thing wash over me until I'm that half mile down the beach that you float before you even realize it, when all of a sudden the familiar umbrella and your people are specks down the shore, waving you back if you choose to pay attention.

When Virginia Woolf walked into the water of the River Ourse and didn't emerge, the stones weighing down her pockets, I can't imagine that no one saw, but maybe that's just because someone has usually been watching me - not known to be a strong swimmer. Still, I've never been truly afraid of the ocean, and can spend more time than you'd believe floating on my back, finding the mellow spot past the breakers where it's warm, going up and over the tiny waves, chasing the sun on the tops of my legs and my chest and my face.

On that same odd trip to the beach when a truly very sweet man and I played that card game, I took a photograph of an exceptional sunset. When I finally made it to the sand the next day, I was alone. It was cold out, walking into the water out of the question, except dipping my toes in to say I touched the ocean, a personal ritual regardless of the season or temperature. I sat on the sand with a notebook on that cold March day, and there was no one around for a good distance. It occurred to me that at that moment, temperature aside, I could walk into the water and just not stop, nothing on the other side but China - a concept we'd been taught as children digging holes for sand castles. We ignored the barrier of Europe and Africa beyond the Atlantic, even the idea of the Far East as ephemeral as air then.

I remember writing this idea of immersion down that day, feeling guilty for even thinking about it, knowing I'd never do it, knowing as sure as I sat there that later that day I'd be getting in a car and heading home, gazing out the window and wishing things different, but far away from this idea and the ocean itself. Still when I thought it, I wondered if, miles or just yards away as it happened that people who cared about me were, would they feel it? Was there an imperceptible shift in the air around the people close to them when people did things like walk into rivers not intending to emerge? Especially when they succeeded? There had to be, I thought - at least a palpitation or a whisper of an itch. But maybe not.

Woolf wrote to her husband in her suicide note, "You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good," one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. "You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be." They didn't find her for 21 days, after which he buried her under a tree in their garden, a last act of being in every way all that anyone could be.

It is a gift to be that way for people, and it's not easy at all. I see it in the people I love, who take care of each other. I see it as they try to figure out what the deal is here for themselves. And I know firsthand that it's hard and often impossible to be entirely patient, and beyond that to be incredibly good, and to still be honest, and to keep your sanity all at once.

I'm not sure how I went tonight from watching tables full of people having a perfectly good time playing a variety of card games whose names I can't remember to thinking about Virginia Woolf walking into the water, or myself sitting by it, for that matter, with the wind kicked up so hard that I couldn't hold the pages down to write what was in my troubled heart. That day was years ago and most things related to it I've tried mostly to forget in the ongoing reinvention of my 30s, in my determination not to let the too-important past be my entire prologue, and maybe to even surprise myself with a renewed capacity for joy. Details - that sunset, my shoes, the bay in the wind from a second-floor balcony - have come back as I've sat here escaping the things that are important now, today. My rivers, and increasingly the ocean they spill into, are figurative. I'm signed on for the duration here, and although there aren't enough storm metaphors in existence to fully express how that's gone, or might yet go, the rocks are on the shoreline, long since removed from my pockets. There's no room for them in there, with all the spare change and lipstick.

I wish that someone had run into Virginia on her way to the river, like so many someones have run into me, and a glance or a word had pierced her resolve to emancipate her husband from a situation he'd have dealt with gladly, most likely, into her old age. I wonder what something would have brought her out of the darkness. Her story has always nagged at me, is one of the pieces of evidence that sometimes things don't work out, seems a waste. The thought of purposefully drowning scares me sitting here - going under, losing breath, weighted.

The people sit around me and play cards, moving pieces methodically around on boards, deep in thought, talking excessively about trading imaginary gold and building kingdoms. Greek gods are somehow involved at one table as well. One man's voice has a pitch so low it dominates the room, an incessant droning of rules and strategy. I'm going back to the word arranging, to researching the facts, trying to make them mesh with my intuition and my common sense, to discard the idea of stopping the droning man and having him ask his shamans and mages in khakis and oxford shirts to check their runes and make a best guess about this actual human life. 

Comments

[joanna]

Laurie, this essay is remarkable. Just perfect.

[Karen]

Jesus Laurie, that was absolutely the best ever. Truly.