Shaped by the Sea

I gaze down at the endless sea of shells that blanket the searing hot sand. Purple ones, striped ones, ones that are cracked into thousands of jagged pieces that pierce the bottom of my blistered feet. Thousands of beach-goers like myself will soon pulverize them into the sand upon which they lie. A fate much like our own, I suppose. Ground to dirt by newer generations, by the future. If you let it, the thought can be one of comfort. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Or "funk to funky" as the late David Bowie once sang.

I look down the beach to my father. He stands just a few yards away but I know, based on the look in his wandering eyes, he isn't here anymore. He's in the back of a 1963 station wagon as it swerves down the A1A in Daytona Beach. The car's being driven by his manic, alcoholic father. His four brothers scream and cry next to him, his mother runs down the street chasing after her babies. The oldest of the bunch, his upper lip is stiff and he doesn't shed a tear, but his heart breaks in two for the hundredth time this year.

I've cried for that little boy my whole life. And all I can do is watch him relive this heartbreak, this panic — I can't intercede because he doesn't hear me.

He never does. I am a fixture. A sounding board. An observer. Someone he talks to at way-too-high volumes that send my nervous system into the familiar shock of childhood. Created only to hear, not be heard. There is no room for love or the stories of others when you wear your trauma like a cross around your tense, choking neck. There's no room for your daughter when you've spent every moment of fatherhood making sure history is, indeed, repeated.

I'm temporarily annoyed by his lack of presence, but I take comfort in acknowledging he hasn't been here this whole trip, his whole life — today is nothing new. He's never present when we're together. I travel down to Florida to visit him once every three-or-so years. He travels to Colorado at about the same frequency, making our meet-ups seldom. And things are better that way, though we never admit it to one another. That would hurt and we're already hurting.

I sank below the water as a child only to resurface a few years ago. But he doesn't see or hear that either. I am a sponge, a vessel to pour his ideas and opinions and anger into. At least, that's the character I play during these visits. The character I played most of my life, I realize. I'm an expert at this game, this production. I am never full, but I'm nearing capacity and I fear that tremendously. Living my truth in his presence would kick up another storm, leaving helpless victims in its wake. I can't bear that. Versions and shards of me have perished in similar squalls. I search the beach for those too sometimes.

My father, the one I love and who I know (in the fleeting moments of stillness he allows) loves me too. Or at least the version of me I pretended to be to feel safe and wanted. The version of myself with no needs, no wants. The easy child. The invisible child. Translucent and fluid like seawater.

He cries into bottles of wine at night about his neglect, his fear, his anxiety. I shake and cry next to him, a violent wave of empathy pulling me under. I can't breathe. A familiar feeling — I took my first gasping breath at 27.

But soon, the roar of the incoming surf releases a fit of newfound rage inside my guts. I inhale deeply and pause.

Growing up in the presence of earth-shattering shame and fear and violence has destroyed me. I have been trying to compile a version of myself I can hold onto with bits and grains of sand. It's working, but the cost cannot be ignored. Sand slips through my trembling fingers and I mutter, "What if he won't love me anymore?" as I build. Pain and anxiety seep through the cracks of my castle walls and I wonder if I am all wrong. If a home can be built without fear. If a life can be lived without shame. If love can be shared without pain.

I stop looking at him and return to the shells. As I stare, I think of each and every life I could have had. The versions of me, of my father, that could have existed had we removed the rot. Barnacles cake an otherwise perfect channeled whelk and I sigh. Maybe it's fate.

His sobs fill the pit in my stomach, but at once, my tears change from that of knowing to that of ire. The saltwater burns the outer corners of my eyes and the corners of my lips are stretched too thin from smiling for thirty years to placate this tyrant of the sea. A father whose emotions change with the tide — his victims tossed dangerously against the rocks of the shore without care.

A shore full of bitter, broken shells. A shore full of opportunities and lives we'll never live. It evokes the strongest current to think like this about these things, but I settle more steadily these days.

The waves kiss the back of my heels and my seasick heart remembers there is room for hope, too. For my current seashell life, for the lives I can still live and pick up and carry with me as I swim out to the depths of the ocean. No longer drowning, I look out on the horizon and whisper goodbye. God of my Sea for so long — Poseidon was an angry, wanting man after all.

He calls for me but I'm already gone. I float on my back in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. A dolphin swims up to me and I graze its grey skin with my fingertips. Bliss.

I'm going to be okay.

Water floods my ears and the sun burns overhead and I feel the waves lapping against my body. Gentle, reassuring. They bring me back to the shore without the slightest bit of effort. They return me to my shells, the lives I still have time to live, should I choose.

And in this moment, I experience pure, unapologetic love and realize I never needed another, not even a father, to find it. Love is the soothing sway of the waves as they hug your tired body. Love brings you to shore and reminds you there's always time to pick up a new shell, to try it on for size. If the one you're wearing doesn't fit anymore, thank it and return it to its mother, to the sea.

It did such a remarkable job protecting you during that long, vicious storm. But it's time to let it go now. It will turn to sand soon enough. Just like you.

And just like me.