what are you?

Fifty yards out, the blue surface gathers, rises foaming white, curls, and crashes in on itself before rolling toward shore and doing it again, spending itself in a final collapse on the beach. I walk through the blazing sand, soft and bright, yielding to my weight, and finally come to the shoreline’s damp, packed grains.

There I stand as the approaching wave, now flattened, slips toward my feet. I step back as it creeps forward and then pulls away, taking with it the little impressions of my toes that my feet have left in the sand. Then I walk forward into the surf, icy-hot against the warm flesh of my ankles and shins. 

I used to sprint into this, flinging myself headlong into the soft bank of a rising wave. But today, I feel like flotsam, broken and old, and prefer to be pulled out to sea. But it does not take me. So I take one small step, feel the cold water rise another few inches over my ankles, and then pause, letting my body adjust. Inch by inch, step by tiny step, I shuffle so that it takes some time for the water to lap against my ribs. 

Now, I watch waves swell in the distance, searching for the one into whose churning roar I will immerse myself. It approaches. I fill my lungs and slip into the bracing underbelly of its crest. Tumbling in the roil, the water slides over my bald head, a cooling laminar flow. Even the stinging brine in my nose is a soothing familiar. 

Surfacing, I swim a few strokes out, roll over, and float on my back. I let my ears sink below the surface as I had in the bathtub as a child, enjoying the mysterious change in sound: the familiar world muted while the bassline of some cosmic breath bubbles slowly up from the depths. Then I close my eyes, and I, too, breathe. 

I taste salt on my tongue and feel it in my eyes. Is it coming in from the ocean or coming out of me? Ashes to ashes, we say, dust to dust. Maybe this is true. But at this moment, I wonder: might I just abide, for a little while at least, suspended in the limbo of the water cycle?

I breathe. 

I used to be a respected university professor, nearing the summit of a thirty-year career that had begun when I was just twenty-five. Then, in February 2019, I wrote a message to a former student. I confided to her that an attachment I felt for her had caused me to behave awkwardly when we’d run into each other on campus. I’d hoped simply to clear the air. It was still wrong to burden her with those feelings, and I quickly realized this and apologized to her. But it was too late. She interpreted my message as a romantic overture and filed a sexual harassment complaint. Two months later, the college president told me I’d be terminated unless I resigned. So I did. 

Now, six months after writing that message, I float alone here. I’ve no job and no home, my marriage has ended, and the story published online by the student newspaper about my case means I will never work as a professor again. I don’t know how to do anything else.

I squeeze my eyes shut tight against the sting.

And then I open them. I open them wide as I can. 

I open them to the cloudless sky, blue, bluer than blue, vast. The water in the ocean, which holds me as I bob quietly, is vast. Vast is the earth, in which this bowl of ocean sits, cradled. Small as I am, I cannot hold this vastness, but I keep my dazed eyes open. I do not have to hold it. It holds me. Suspended in this reality, the awful shame, humiliation, and terror of the past few months give way to wonder at the turning, kaleidoscopic cosmos in which I am but the tiniest, glassy fragment. 

What are you? 

This question will become my mantra, my prayer. But at first, it is involuntary, drawn unbidden from a silence that is deeper than the deepest me. 

I need no answer. I want no answer. The question alone satiates, comforts, and delights over the next few months.

What are you? I will pray to the continent’s first dawn’s light, appearing on the horizon as I sit atop a 350-million-year-old knob of granite.

What are you? I will pray to the drowsy leather-skinned crocodiles, as I glide on the dizzying reflections of primordial liquid land.

What are you? I will pray to the two saguaro giants carefully embracing one another upon the endless waves of the Sonoran desert. 

What are you? I will pray to the twisting slot canyon and its vault of 1000-foot shimmering walls draped with mossy garlands as I creep and float in icy, waist-high water. 

What are you? I will pray to the silent red rock, looming above me in the vast blue sky, dignified by its own erosion.

What are you? I will pray to the trees outside my window, swaying gracefully in the wind.      

What are you? I will pray to the tablespoon of bony gray dust was my father’s body; that was my mother’s body. I miss you. I am sorry. Thank you. What are you?

 What are you? I will pray to the fragile, trembling single violin, which I hear each time for the first time. The music slides softly into the earth of my heart, reminding me that it is soft and of all the soft places. 

My heart is lanced. Everything releases. The ocean flows.

I turn to others’ stories. I hear their stories. I accept their stories. I accept the stories that tell about the pain I caused others: my former student, yes, but also my sons, my siblings, my parents, my friends, and my partners. I feel sad and sorry I caused you pain. 

My ears surface, and I hear the world return. Scrubbed by the breaking wave and carried with attention in the sea’s soft rocking palm, I am buoyed. Light, happy, floating effortlessly now, I am home again.

And then I come to love words better, more capaciously. I cradle them gently in open hands as ocean, earth, and sky have cradled me this day.

What are you? I pray now to the words that make me cry because their arrival feels so right. Because scrubbed, like me, they become clear and free and flowing wind or water, light: a clean story of a clean being, the clear recording of my moving like a wind through this world, now still, now a breath, now a gust, now a steady pushing. 

What are you? I pray now to this self I am becoming: just a clear little stream with no name anyone remembers, trickling happily on its way, finding its way home.

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