Into the waves

Saltwater swirled around my outstretched fingers, the chill of the October brine prickling at my ashen skin. The pallid grey-green sky and the eerily calm flow of the tides signaled that a storm was coming- i'd need to batten down the hatches.

It certainly wasn't the most conventional way to be 'homeless'.

I rose to my feet, letting out a sigh as the steady rocking of the boat threatened to throw me off balance. I'd grown up sailing, so one would think i'd have my sea-legs by now, but it seemed that not even a lifetime of experience was a match for my genetically endowed clumsiness.

My father had taken everything from us. My mothers Porche was the first to go, now acting as the taxi to his mistress. Everything else soon followed. The final piece had been our home, surreptitiously ripped out from underneath us by his rat-eyed lawyer and sold to the first bidder.

Somehow, he'd had the kindness to leave us the boat, although i'm still uncertain if being amicable was his true intent, or if the gesture was a final "fuck you" to my Mother, whos' love of the sea had always trumped any feelings of fondness she had for him. Now, it was all that she had.

It was my third year living out on the harbor, and i'd grown accustomed to the stark differences in my lifestyle. Books of etiquette for young ladies had been traded for dusty maps; the sleek, tight bun of a ballet student swapped out for untamed, salt-kissed ringlets. My nights were no longer spent practicing the piano, but kicking my feet in the midnight surf at salt-of-the-earth dock parties rife with the swear-filled stories of grey-bearded men. The soundtrack to my life had become the tinny melody of The Grateful Dead fighting its way through cheap boombox speakers; their colorful tunes reflected on my favorite tie-dye shirts. It was a different life, but it was mine, and I cherished it all the same.

My Mother often wonders who I would have become if our world hadn't been turned upside down; a sentiment she has echoed in the chambers of her guilt for decades. What would have become of me if our upper class life hadn't spiraled into the inky black of the nighttime sea we spent 10 years of our lives patrolling, two earthen sirens brought out to the waves. She wanted "more" for me- maybe I would have been a doctor, she thinks aloud; certainly not the woman I am now, all tousled hair and tired eyes that navigate the keys of my laptop as I once did the ocean, marking words to the screen like X's on a pirates treasure map. To me, there's no use wondering what could have been- maybe, in another world, I fulfilled my childhood dream of going to Brown University and being married by 25, but i'm content in this one, where I can only sleep to the manufactured song of the tides from my sound machine drowning out the madness of New York City, and the sea calls to my heart like an unforgotten lover, beckoning me home.

I reflect on that stormy, third year night often with a prideful melancholy- the nimble, young fingers of a 9 year old girl sporting calluses that my hands were never meant to wear furling the sails and weighting the anchor of a 28 foot sailboat in preparation of the gale to come- climbing down into the bowels of the rocking structure just as the rain began to caress my cheeks; ones still rosy with the kiss of youth. It was the night I first felt like an adult; curled into a nest of blankets in the aft cabin, a sense of accomplishment washing over my small, tired body.

I had felt so grown, so beyond children of my age, but my final notion before drifting off to slumber betrayed an innocence that even the darkness of the stormy sea could not take from me:

I may not have been the ballerina I dreamed of, I thought; but I made one hell of a mermaid.