Way back then—oh, way back then, we used to wake while the stars still sang and drive down to the beaches in Mississippi on a summer weekend. Mom, Dad, and me.
The drive was somewhere around 2 hours, give or take, but for me it passed in the speedy infinity of a dream. I would be in jitters the whole way, leg rattling and bouncing like a pogo stick. Sometimes I was so excited I could hardly sleep the night before. I would stare out the window and beg the trees along the highway to pass quicker. All I wanted was to see her.
My desire was a spiraling frenzy, a true August hurricane, and by the time we reached the parking lot it consumed and concealed all my senses, my sight, sound, all my reason, all except for her. My eye of the storm. The moment the engine died, I was off. Sprinting like a backyard Olympian, all else forgotten. Over the dune I could hear her calling. Her smell, her breath, her doorstep, the unwieldy sand.
And as I ran, she reached out to me, again and again. She threw her rolling waves up the shore just to touch me, and when she couldn't find me, she retreated and tried again. She wanted me just as bad as I wanted her. But it was okay. She didn't have to wait for long. Beneath the seagulls' wails my little legs beat the blistering sand and carried me right into her waiting arms.
I felt unquestionably safe in two places: with my mom, and with her.
I felt always and absolutely happy in one place: in her embrace.
It was a funny little notion I had, that the ocean was alive. And not alive like a tree or a god, old and grand and inscrutable, but alive like a person.
If I hadn't been capping at double digits, I would have said that we had what lovers had. Maybe it wasn't accurate, anyway. Yet neither was she like a mother to me, or a sister, and the word friend just fell short somehow. How do you qualify that kind of love to a little kid?
Oh well. That was way back—a long, long time ago.
YOU ARE READING
Mer!
Science Fiction"The people of this land know that mermaids are real," the professor said. "They're born with the knowledge--it's in their blood. If you ask them, of course they'll say 'No, you bellend. Are you on crack?' They lie. But they don't lie because you're...
