margin

Driving through the low costal mountains, the tree bark is covered in moss, branches heavy with it, sagging over the road. The intermittent rain is thrown back up from the pavement by passing cars, making new showers, rewetting the windshield, leaving me fumbling for the wipers in an unfamiliar car. I catch sight of the ocean, finally, over a low hill, a fleeting strip of flat grey after hours of lush spring green. It disappears as the hill bottoms out, behind an ace-hardware and discount barber, walk-in’s welcome. I find signs for a public beach and park. Hopping across the muddy banks of a freshwater creek, there is suddenly a quarter mile of packed, low-tide sand between myself and a mountain of angry, crashing, bone-chilling water. A lighthouse stands sentinel on an outcropping far down the shore to the north. One family in rain boots teases the incoming waves at the margin of the ocean. A man and his black dog wander towards the rocky end of the sand, zigzagging drunkenly across the expanse, following the vagrant path of a wet tennis ball. Each are tiny, dancing smudges of black in relief against the water and sand, the bright, cloud hazed sun reflecting off their varying surfaces. I walk towards the water, obliquely. A direct route to such a force does not seem prudent, given these last weeks.

These days, the dreams wake me in the deepest part of the night and I am afraid to return to them. Yet I do not want to be awake. Even in sunlight, I do not want to be awake. Days that are not full are a threat, darkness crowds the edge of vision but flees when I turn my head. I cannot look this thing full on. Looking sideways as I have been, I cannot see where it goes, or how it will leave us in its wake. The glimpses are enough to set my heart racing. I think I am afraid of what I will see when I finally let myself look at it straight on, without shadow. I know it will be an ugly, monster of a thing. The future will be ragged with its passing. There are no even edges ahead, no clean wounds. So I hold onto the tasks, hands fluttering to find more, and flee the silences.

But standing in the sunset on the edge of the ocean, I want to be brave enough to face this like I am facing that immense, indifferent beast. How will I come out on the other side of what I am faced with walking through? It does not care about me, or how I will manage. It is just a thing that must be faced, be walked, be survived. There is no right answer, no easy way through, no way to pass without scratches, and bleeding, and scars. And I begin to fill with hate for what I was promised, and what I have been dealt instead. I push back against it, believing still that hate directed at fate only saps what energy you have and then falls, ineffectual, in a heap of useless rags before you are through the worst.

Last night, I stayed on a whim at the infamous Sylvia Beach Hotel, a haven perched on a grassy cliff above Nye Beach along the Oregon coast. I have been wandering around the building and its surroundings in a state of barely-veiled bliss since I arrived. I want to stay for a week, or maybe a year. There are couches and chairs, blankets and coffee and tea and an ever changing vista in three directions. It feels like a refuge. The ocean, turning from morning grey into a deep slate blue, is churning on the shore below where I sit perched in an overstuffed chair next to a roaring fire on the third floor, coffee at hand. This feels like a good place to sort through things and gather strength. And there is plenty of gathering needed, these days. I am loathe to leave, though I must. I hope it won’t be long before I can return.

Yesterday, after walking along the beach, I went back to the discount barber, his shop perched in a front room dingy with age and grease. There was a single spinning chair, patched with black tape, a curtain of indiscriminate pattern blocking the hallway. The list price for a new client cut, hand written on yellowing paper tacked to the faux-wood wall, was thirteen dollars. I told him to take off the length, but to leave enough that it could be pulled back. As I expected, he chopped quickly through almost all of it, a year’s worth of growth in a dark pile on the floor and nothing left to be pulled back. I smiled and dug out cash, reveling in the light- headed feeling of all that weight gone. It is not a new beginning. New beginnings don’t exist in the tumbling inevitability of time’s relentless push forward. We are caught up in the flow and there are no do-overs to be had. But it is something.