The Shore

I sit at the edge of Lake Michigan, my toes almost to the water. The tide is soft. It’s April.

The leaves have returned to the trees in my neighborhood. It’s a quiet reminder that everything in life is a cycle of birth, then growth, then death. And, at the end of it, things get to be born again.

I feel as though I am sinking into the sand, trying to remember what it felt like when you touched my arm, the first time, and whispered to me that it was time to go. I am trying to remember what it felt like to be in love with you.

There is a ship, far out in the lake, just a small silhouette on the horizon. It must be most of the way to Michigan by now. I always wanted to sail from Illinois to Michigan, but I never made it out much past the locks. I remember once, we sailed out into the lake, maybe a mile off shore, in the middle of the night. We watched the sparkling lights of the city and we held each other, rocking back and forth with the movement of the water. On our way back to the dock you sped up, and the wind became aggressive, and your Cubs hat — the one your grandfather gave you when you were a boy — was blown off your head and was lost, somewhere out in that great expanse. I hope it found its way to the place where lost things go. Out there, somewhere, lies a place full of missing treasures. Out there lies a place where love is condensed into a pile of misplaced memories, and trinkets, and wishes.

I feel as though I could be carried out by the tide, to the center of the lake, and float my body across. I am thinking of what it felt like when we faked a baptism in the river on my twenty-eighth birthday. You dipped my body into those frigid waters while the tadpoles and crayfish surrounded us. You pulled me back up, reborn, welcoming a new season or a new year or a new memory of what it feels like to be in love.

The story between us ended differently than I expected, though it ended exactly as it began: quickly and all at once; recklessly. The wall I had built around my vulnerability had shattered the moment I met you. The rest of me shattered the moment that you set me free.

When we first met, we didn’t leave my bed for three days, each of us so enamored, so enraptured with the other. You told me of the lives that you had lived, the places the tides had carried you. I told you that I had been a ship, lost at sea, searching for the shore. You, at that time, were the shore. I loved the look of your face, the feel of your hands, the beating of your heart. I watched you sleep, and watched each quiet inhale then exhale then inhale again. Your life cycle, your REM cycle, my happy ending. There was magic in that romance, the special kind you see in old hollywood films where Humphrey Bogart stands like a statue, smoking a cigarette, changing the course of human romance for good. It was the kind of magic that made us feel invincible. With that love we could change the world. With that love we could carry our bodies across the sea.

When you left me, I didn’t leave my bed for three days. I slept most of those hours. I didn’t eat. I took a pregnancy test because my broken heart had given me extreme bouts of nausea. The test was negative. I thought that it would be. But I had thought that maybe if it was positive you would have to love me again, whether we lost it or we ended it or we carried it with us for nine full months and then the rest of our lives. Had it had a different outcome, you would be bound to me. We would spread our magic beyond ourselves, out into the changing tides. But the outcome stayed the same while I stayed in bed.

I watch the ship on the darkening horizon, the sun slowly sinking behind the Chicago skyline at my back. I try to remember what it felt like when we slept in the back of my car at a rest stop in Wyoming, watching the stars float across the sky above my sunroof. I try to remember what it felt like when you called me and told me that you wouldn’t be coming to dinner. I try to remember what it felt like when I let myself lose myself in the lake, in the river, in the waters of possibility that I imagined when we first fell in love.

All love stories have to have an ending. This was ours: two lost people adored each other. But, as we know, they were lost. They became so lost that not only could each not find the other, but each could not find themself. In their confusion they became disoriented and, hoping to find the other, each made their way to a lake. One stood on the east side, the other on the west. Neither had a boat and so they couldn’t meet in the middle. So they sat at the shore, and they waited.

I sit at the edge of Lake Michigan, and I set myself free. I don’t need to wait here anymore. I thank you for the memories. I thank you for the love. I thank you for shattering my wall, a wall that I haven’t put back together. I now have a hedgerow that circles around my vulnerability. I trim it into topiary shapes of diamonds, a family of bears, a heart. I trim it while I allow visitors to come and go. I open a little archway that leads into the garden of my love. You can come in, if you want, and sit with me as friends do. I’ll ask you what you’ve been up to or where the tide has taken you recently. I’ll tell you that I remember why I loved you and you will tell me the same. And when you leave I will hold your hand one last time, and walk with you to the edge of the lake.