Every Way But Words

As they lay together on the beach, as the day’s embers cooled, she took his face in her hand. She couldn’t help herself.

He smiled, wrinkling his nose without opening his eyes. Dried grains of sand tumbled off his cheek as he said, “Do you love me or something?”

She had said it in every way but words. And she felt like he had too. In the way he’d taken her hand when she got off the bus that morning and he hadn’t let go. He hadn’t needed to say the words. Not while they walked down the spit. Not while they tiptoed round the pecked-clean crab shells. Not while the foam played around their ankles.

Only when her flip-flop floated free and headed for the ocean and he gave chase had his fingertips broken away from hers.

In these few summer weeks, her love for him had become as real as the breeze which rippled his sun-bleached tresses. It was as warm and fiery as the connexion of their sunburnt calves. It flowed through her, and between them, and back around her in loops that bound them. It was almost too much for words. Too much for her heart.

'Could a heart break from too much love? Was that the truest, purest manifestation of tragedy?' she wondered.

It was strange not to say it, seeing as words were her world. Since she'd been a kid she'd written everything in a journal, every day without fail.

Since they'd left Seattle and come to the West Coast, the journal had been her rock, her therapist and her closest confidant. It knew everything she did and thought.

Just this week it had been the cat’s antics in the attic, and her brother’s unsubtle masturbation in the next room, and her mother’s decision to buy a hot tub, and her disappointment at how slow to reply all her old friends in Seattle had become. But she’d never written about Josh. That would make him erasable, tearable, trashable. To her, words were in her thrall, they were controllable. But Josh was untamable. She wanted to always be discovering him, even if that meant never knowing him.

Also she wanted to keep him to herself. She hadn't told her mom. Her brother only knew by accident, and besides he was sworn to secrecy. She hadn't told even her oldest friends back home.

In the evenings, after she’d been with him at the beach, staying long after her shift had ended bussing at the surf shack, she would steal back into the house under cover of her brother’s unwilling complicity, and open her journal with every intention of letting it all flow out on the page.

But the physical poetry he inspired in her body did not translate. The rolling surf of her feelings lost their power, they became unformed and obtuse in words. So she didn’t try.

Instead she found herself flicking back in time to the pages she'd written before the move, those final days in wet and rainy Seattle, with all the tears of all the goodbyes, the sick feeling every time she left a place for the last time, the dread of uncertainty about whether she’d ever have friends who would love her again, all those heavy days when the weather matched her mood, black and laden.

She closed the journal and turned off the light.

A sudden breeze came through the crack in the window, chilling her spine. She wrapped the quilt tight around her, wishing it was Josh. Maybe the legendary California weather was finally turning. Crazy huh? After these weeks with Josh, it was hard to believe it would ever rain again.