Deciding to Accept My Indecion

I walked barefoot along the water’s edge where the sand and the sea and the sky blurred to gray. Cracked crab shells and jelly fish littered the beach. I kept my focus on my feet but sensed a slick dark figure bobbing in the breakers; a body surfer in a wetsuit, I figured. I turned to look. Muted light on the waves bounced and rolled like pewter coins. I shaded my eyes.

“Hey,” a stranger on the beach called to me. “Do you know you have a seal following you?”

“Yes,” I said, though that became true only as I said it.

The seal raised herself from the water then, head, neck, and sloped shoulders bared. Her eyes, wide set and watery black, stared straight into my own.

•

My husband jokes that I am part selkie. In Celtic legend, selkies are curious seals cursed to live as humans. Or sometimes they are described as fallen angels condemned to live as seals. The mythology is fluid. But the recurring theme is of a tortured soul torn between two worlds, unable to settle in either.

In one tale, an emotionally detached young mother spends hours staring longingly at the Irish sea while her neglected brood run wild. The children discover an old trunk and, inside, a shiny seal skin. They present the found treasure to their mother who wraps herself in it, kisses each child goodnight, and is never heard from again. But every so often the children spot a seal with eerily familiar eyes staring longingly at them upon the shore.

Some people know their place in this world. Whether they stay put, follow a clearly marked trail, or forge ahead on their own, they have total confidence in their coordinates. They feel certain.

I envy them. It seems wherever I am — physically, personally, professionally — I feel ambivalent. It’s not a bland wishy-washy, meh, whatever, feeling. It’s a heart-wrenching internal tug-o-war between yes and no, high and low, stay and go. I am unsettled.

The selkie is practically my patron saint.

The man on the beach said he’d heard of tales of seals following people but he’d never seen it before.

“It’s supposed to be a sign of good luck,” he said.

“Yeah?"

“Oh maybe it was bad luck,” he said with a laugh.

I laughed, too.

•

I know nothing about ocean animals.

I grew up in the landlocked midwest. We had lakes, ten thousand of them. Some had grassy banks and willow trees that swished and dipped to make rings in the surface of the waters. Others had wooden docks and sandy beaches perfect or lazing in the sun. My five siblings and I learned to swim in those waters. We took trun holding onto our father’s back while he swam out to the floating dock where no one’s feet could touch bottom. I still remember the thrill of flying out beind him like the cape of Superman flapping in the wind. I was terrified I’d lose my grip. But the moment we reached the safety of the shore, I begged, “Again! Again!”

One monstrously hot and sticky August, the lake took on a sickly shade of green. Pop-eyed carp littered the shore. I waded in anyway. The water left a slimy film on the skin of my legs that smelled of swamp marsh and dead fish.

“Out,” my mother said.

She packed the six of us back into the Chevy and drove directly to the new municipal swimming pool. The water there looked bluer than any summer sky. Standing waist deep in the shallow end, I could see straight down to my stubby toes. I dunked under and opened my eyes. A garden of bright floral swimsuits bloomed. Bikini ruffles undulated like tropical fish fins. Lost locker keys and copper pennies lay at the bottom of the pool like sunken treasures. It looked beautiful.

But for days after, my nose burned with the smell of bleached bed sheets.

•

I’ve sought reasons for my restlessness. I’ve longed for explanations, if not excuses, for my failure to settle.

Maybe it was in my DNA like blue eyes and blond hair. There are Irish travelers, nomads who’ve roamed the island countryside for a thousand years, with my last name. Maybe restlessness is a latent gene that inexplicably resurfaced, an ancestral trait that can be identified in mail-order saliva tests.

Or maybe my environment made me unsettled. I was the fourth of six children but fell smack-dab in the middle, age-wise. My older brothers saw our family grow. My younger brothers watched it shrink as siblings moved out. My formative years took place in-between when all eight of us crammed into a tiny house realtors now euphemistically call two-plus bedrooms. (We kids dubbed the plus room “the canal” because it offered a short cut from the kitchen to the one bathroom.) It was an era of beauty and bedlam, chaos and creativity and so much fun. Homelife never felt settled. Nor did I wish for settled.

Shortly after I turned eighteen, I hitch-hiked through Italy with a friend. We slept in the train station in Venice, on a beach in Corfu, hopped rickety local buses through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In India, I met a man who would become my husband.

The first time he suggested marriage, I balked. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. I did. But I used to joke that he was the one-nightstand than never ended until he asked me to stop saying that. I had no interest in marriage. But we were living in England at the time and my visa was about to expire, and he’d been denied a visa to the USA. Marriage would solve both our issues. And so I agreed with one condition: We would tell no one. I had a good reason. Although I wrote letters to my family, I hadn’t seen them for more than three years and wasn’t about to show up with a husband in tow. But secret wedding vows also meant I could tie the knot while keeping it loose, get hitched yet remain unattached, take the plunge without making a splash.

In short, it allowed me to remain in the nebulous, restless, in-between of the unsettled.

We eventually told everyone and the years rolled on. We’re married still and no one is more surprised by this than I.

•

I’ve never tried to swim along the Oregon coast. I wouldn't dare. The water is numbingly cold. In places, waves crash violently against rugged rocks. Tree-sized logs are occasionally tossed onto the shore like Pick Up Stix.

But in the still waters of a lake, I can float on my back staring skyward until the separation between the blue above me and below me begins to disappear. Then I dip the base of my skull, arch my spine, and bone by bone, curl slowly backward into the soundless water, suspended between earth and air.

The man on the beach marveled at how the seal seemed interested only in me. To test his theory, he stepped backwards and put several yards between us. The seal completely ignored him and remained focused on me alone.

“Isn’t that something,” he said crossing the sand again.

And I had to agree it was something. But what?

“The waves are trying to push her one way and the tide is pulling her another but she has stayed virtually in the same place,” he said. “Think of the strength that takes.”

Sometimes being neither here nor there is exactly where you want to be.

The man and I parted ways on the beach. The seal moved with me. After a while, I changed direction. She did the same. I reversed again, so did the seal.

Eventually, it was time to head inland. I paused for a last look at the seal. We stared at one another, transfixed. Suddenly, the seal dove and disappeared. The spell broke. I watched the waves but never saw her surface again. I imagined her swimming off through the layers of life hidden in those waters, translucent jellyfish, purple velella velella, and green kelp swaying in a landscape I would never know.