The Ocean As A Parachute

It was getting to be afternoon.  Sand had gotten into my mouth, past my braces and the wires clamping my jaw shut.  I had no choice but to swallow the stuff.  My fingers compulsively flew up to my face, massaging an aching jaw.  I worried that my face was still too puffy, swollen, ugly.  Who was I kidding anyway?  She wasn't going to show, the girl I had run into walking her dog along the beach the previous morning.  Her golden retriever had bounded across the dunes straight up to me and stuck it's wet, sandy muzzle straight into the crotch of my khaki shorts.  She apologized as she pulled her dog out of my groin.  

"It looks like I peed my pants,"  I remarked, trying to make funny out of awkward.  She looked up from the faux piss stain on my shorts.  Her hair was short.  Her eyes were brilliant blue.

"What's wrong with your mouth?  Have you got something stuck in there?"  

I had managed to make it for two weeks and some since the operation without stooping to writing my words down on the scratch pad I had been lugging around.  My dad gave it to me.  He got fed up with trying to decipher my nasally mumbling and impatient gesturing.  Whatever.  It sounded perfectly understandable to me.  What I wouldn't do for friends and family, I now did for a girl.  I began scribbling.

"You had surgery on your jaw and it's wired shut?  That sucks.  Hey, how do you eat then?  There's not much of you to begin with.  You might blow away with the wind!"

She was right.  I was skinny; skinny when I went into the O.R. and even skinnier when I woke up.  Even before the operation, kids told me I had this huge, peanut head stuck on a pile of flimsy twigs.  The swelling in my face exaggerated this to great effect.  What the hell though.  I wasn't going to dither about what we were talking about.  I just wanted to keep on talking with this pretty girl.  I continued with the pen and scratch pad.

"Milkshakes, huh?  So everything has to go into your stomach through a straw?"  That's wild."

We walked along for a bit through the dunes.  She talked about her high school and studio choir.  I wrote down that I played guitar my school's choir.  That wasn't entirely true.  They let me play a three note thing in a Beach Boys song at some ham dinner thing.  Still, I had to put something on the table.  Adolescence was working some serious shit on me.  I was not a real good looking boy; not by a long shot.

"We're staying up here so I gotta head back in.  Hey, why don't you meet me back here tomorrow at 11:00 in the morning?  We'll go down into Long Beach and get something through a straw."

I couldn't stop thinking about it for the rest of the day and long into the night.  So I made my way out to meeting place and waited, squinting through the salty drizzle.  At first I thought I had gotten the time wrong.  Hurry up and wait is a way of life in my family.  An hour or so later, I remained at the spot.  I drew in the sand with a stick and tried to look like I wasn't a rube being set up.  Finally, it sunk in that the whole thing was a joke.  Fuck.  Yet again, I came out on the other end of an interaction with somebody and wound up so embarrassed and humiliated that I wanted to fucking die.

 I started out towards the surf when I heard laughter in the dunes.  Two female voices.  I couldn't make out the words.  It didn't matter.  I could tell by the tone they were mocking me.  At that point, I was overcome with a powerful urge to walk straight out into the surf and drown.  With my eyes fixed on the roiling breakers of the Pacific Ocean, I headed west.  The chilly water soaked my shoes and socks, wicked up my levi's and squeezed the breath out of me.  It felt right.  I would just keep walking until the waves knocked me off my feet.  Eventually the salty water would fill up my lungs.  The ocean would consume me and all of this would stop.  About waist deep in the surf, I felt those loathsome feelings recede inside me.  They couldn't stand up to the ocean.  My clothes were soaked and heavy but my body felt light and innervated.  I turned toward the shore and headed home.  It would always be here, pounding against the beach, constant, waiting.  I chose not to drown myself that day.  Just a little bit of oblivion would do.  Walking back home in my soaking clothes I smiled.  You gotta be prepared.  You gotta know all your options.