Valentine's Day

I don’t like Valentine’s Day. That hardly makes me a minority, I know.

But with everything that has been happening lately… I’ve tried not thinking about “Rebecca”. I don’t really need to get into my thoughts on the subject. If you read my post from the day after I saw her last, you can probably imagine how I feel.

So I drove down to Ocean Beach and tried to not imagine what she was doing with “Jesse <3”. And I drank myself to stone. Wedged into the shore, cold February winds buried me in sand. I watched the sun set not for the beauty of it but because I was too drunk to really realize what was happening. By the time my head began to pull out of it, the sky was purple, the ocean was black.

Beneath my hooded sweater, no one seemed to recognize me. I hardly recognized myself.

Along with Valentine’s Day, I’m not a huge fan of open bodies of water. But there I stood, casting off my sweater, my shirt, my pants. I was set on the ocean. I walked into the surf, too numb to let the chill drive me back. Instead I kicked my shins into the force of the water and dove in.

Being in the ocean is an overwhelming feeling. Of all the horrible, terrifying creatures that live there, there are so many still undiscovered. You leave the tiny world of land and find yourself swallowed by one unfathomably greater, where there is nothing waiting for you but to drown.

Or be eaten.

I remember thinking, to be eaten by something that is neither malicious nor callous, something that simply eats out of a function of the natural order… it’s not such a bad thing.

Swimming farther into the darkness, waves beating out the strength in my arms, spitting out salt, I felt the fight leave my body. It seemed to be a very long time and at the bottom of each wave, I expected to somehow drop. But I never did, though I found myself beyond the waves, my legs kicking limply forward. There I waited.

There are great whites in these waters, even a hammerhead last summer. There are pods of squid not far down the coast that tear people to pieces. That’s not to mention the unknown creatures that could have been watching me as I simply tread water for a good, long while.

Not much farther I could make out a buoy, rocking back and forth. Dipping my head beneath the water, I made my way to it and wrapped my arms around it’s wide base. Towards the horizon there was no longer any telling the difference between the ocean and the sky, it was simply a black shroud. Back towards the shore, I saw the lights of restaurants and bars, filled with people who did not know what it was like to be kidnapped for someone else to try eat them. They didn’t know what it was like to work up the courage to confess your love only have that person try to turn you in for reward money.

And, in that moment, they didn’t know how it felt to be alone.

Something brushed against my leg. It was not the chain that held the buoy to the ocean floor forty feet below. If it was a fish, it was not a small one. It could have been anything.

In my melancholy I had brought myself to the kind of place I have always had nightmares about. My heart began to race, my thoughts sharpened. Maybe there was a shark circling, about to rip me apart.

My arms clinging to the buoy, I began to laugh.