Converge/Diverge | Allison Bothley

I am singing in a low register. Tomorrow, it will be September. The north wind is bringing fall on the back of a storm. Everything is grey tones: the sky, the water, the sand. The waves heave over the sand bar.

I trace an inexact heart in the cold sand. Oily aubergine ribbons spiral away from the toe that made it. The water creeps up and washes my heart away. I trace it again. It gets washed away. I trace. It washes. Trace. Washes. And again and again, until I blot it out completely with the stab of a heel.

The hole fills with water and empties and fills and empties again. I move to a new spot. A fresh start. I am singing in a low register.

The house is white and crisp, painted on the grim sky. It stands compact and cheerful, like a gift wrapped in hope. Behind the house, a fire pit and chairs sit in a neat semi-circle. A barbeque, a periwinkle lounger, and a glass tabletop on brown wicker legs complete the scene. Inside, I remember a table, a chair, a suitcase, a stack of books, a pile of words. Words against words next to words making meaning. It means something—it must. It must! But what it means to me is different from what it means to you.

You will come. You won’t come. The morning is almost gone now. I am tracing the sand with my toe, and I am singing in a low register. Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine…

***

You are not here. Despite the threatening weather, the beach is full. It’s the last weekend before back-to-school preparation will start in earnest. Then, tags will be cut off clothes for first days that are much too hot for first-day clothes.

I am watching summer’s children dig a trench around a castle with concentration. The oldest is the foreman, shouting orders to two others who run on besieged feet with buckets and watering cans to the somersaulting waves. Half-filled, they rush back to pour into the trough from height sending water and mortar, almost destroying the castle in the process. The foreman is shouting, now down on hands and knees to patch the sides and reinforce the walls. I marvel at their freedom. Little girls who do not care about the shape of their flesh or faces. Little boys not consumed with bravado or performance. Watching them, I want to be a child again, lost in play, with the job of the moment, to dig and fill, and nothing else. I want to be a beginner again. To begin again.

***

You are here. I stand to meet you eye to eye. My hair is blowing in the wind, and you are here saying something into that same wind. Your words are catching in my hair like fish in a net. I want to gather them up before they slip away, your words. I want to write them down, to press them in this time and place between two crisp pages. I want to open the notebook tomorrow and say, See! These words exist outside the unmovable parameters of our lives. I wasn’t sure until now.

***

You are not here. I am sitting boldly on a log, a sentry defiant to the wind, to the waves. They scream at me, casting spittle like a disgruntled adult throwing a tantrum at a customer service rep. Each time they peak and lunge, I feel as if I am being singled out. You, they say, you. But I won’t retreat. I want to feel everything I deserve. The good and the bad. I am bad, I am good.

I am thinking about a shipwreck. About Viola washed up on the beach. Open-hearted Viola becoming someone else. Viola, falling in love with a capricious man and living happily ever after—or so goes the tale.

***

You are here. I stare at you for a moment just blinking. A smile plays on my lips, your lips. Like always, my body responds with a tightening, a quiver, a quickening, and laughter. You are fully dressed— covered from head to toe. I keep remarking to myself how you could be any man of you age and description. There is nothing special about you. A dime a dozen. I note the small day bag, hanging by your leg like an afterthought and I become acutely aware that I am almost naked in my black bathing suit.

“You came,” I say.

“For a little while,” you say, and I remember what’s special about you. It’s that something that lives in your voice that passes through my mind. Your voice is seeing the lights of the city at night for the first time from a quiet car. Your voice is jazz on the car radio, all syncopated rhythms and complex harmony. Your voice is honey scrub poured on my back.

I force myself to stand up taller, to unhunch, and tighten my life-weathered abdomen. Never mind. You came. That means something. It must.

***

You are not here. My mood is turning maudlin. The waves heave.

“Tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love,” I say petulantly to no one with acid in my voice.

I once read that all the good plays end in a wedding, but I prefer history plays: bold speeches and rhetoric on grassy hills; the certainty of victory or death. But Viola – what happens to her after the end? What comes after happily ever after—is it victory or death?

***

“Come up to the house,” I say, and begin walking. I don’t turn to make sure you’re following, though I wish I could. It’s a relief that you come inside and we stand in the Newport-style kitchen all white on white and blue making small talk. I think I would like it very much if it was my kitchen but maybe it’s just the absence I like of the odds and ends that come with living— the stacks of random paper on the microwave and sauce spots on the backsplash.

I offer you a drink. You say no. I say I have coffee or wine or gin or water, waving my hand at the grocery bag I’ve yet to unpack. You say no. I think about my cellulite. I look at the patterned towel limp on the chair, too far to get to without taking my eyes off you. I don’t want to take my eyes off you.

***

You are not here. Maybe I imagined you. Maybe I made you up somewhere deep in my thalamus. A small-t trauma response. Maybe you are the result of my dysfunctional attachment style. A pattern. Something I needed to overcome to level up. To live my highest good. That would explain the two dimensions that I am set on seeing you in: perfection and pain.

Or maybe we are just characters in some snow globe. Characters moving around vignettes of benches, storefronts, cafes, and parking lots. Part of a collection, the watched and the watchers.

***

You are here. I don’t know what to do with my hands, and I feel too aware of them at the ends of my arms. I get a glass of water and set it down on the old wood island in front of you and step back to my original spot, resetting. We are talking about the place, the drive. We are talking about nothing, and I just want to touch you. I always want to touch you. To press myself into your lap. To put my hands under your sweater onto your stomach. To drag the corner of my mouth along your greying beard. I always want to touch you, but I rarely do.

The feeling is unbearable, standing here and there making small talk. We should sit on the white sectional, but I am sandy from the beach. I don’t want to lose the damage deposit.

“Stay there,” I say. “Don’t leave.”

I go into the bathroom, but at the last moment I leave the door ajar. I am thinking about you, and I leave the door ajar: a hope; a choice; an invitation.

***

An invitation. I slipped you a postcard across the table with the address written down in sloppy black pen. Wrote it before I lost my nerve.

“Come to the beach,” I said, looking you dead in the eyes. “Come and let me get sick of you. I am a good person. I am a bad person. And so are you. Make your excuses and come to the beach.”

***

I left the door ajar. You come through it after a few minutes of what I assume is rumination. You are still fully dressed, black on blue, and I feel the urge to conceal myself, but my hands stay by my side. Let me be seen; let me be judged. I am wet with water and slick with wanting. My heart is a hummingbird. It flaps from my chest to my ears and down again. I look you dead in the eyes.

You stall, unsure.

“Come here,” I say.

***

You are not here. I am looking out at the horizon, sitting in the sand, singing in a low register. Couples walk along, not hand in hand, but together. I wanted to be alone, together. I wanted to give this to myself, a small thing so big it could sustain me for the other half of my life. Something for only me. A love to wrap up and place away in a box. But it got away from me. It got bigger than small. And I wasted my breath on prayers, on signs, on idyll make-believe. It was a wonderful respite that I held too tight. I risked the house for promises, words. I tried to force it; to make the make belief real. And now it’s all I have: a fantasy. And what did I expect? Women in my position never win. This is the order of things.

In the sand, I find a stone for skipping, flat and round as a silver dollar and black as a void. I palm it, a new talisman.

***

You are here and I am blind from bliss. I am confetti inside.

***

You are not here. I have five missed calls. A message on my phone says The kids miss you. Call before bedtime. I try to count the time between thinking about you and the other things. I look back at the horizon, at those children, at the water. How long was that?

Never mind.

***

There is before and there is after. We lay next to each other. You are telling me a story you’ve told a million times before, but it’s the first time I’ve heard it.

“Imagine if I met you long ago,” I say. I’m embarrassed for saying this out loud and I hide my face behind my tangled hair. It is a coy move I planned. Every move with you is planned. Manufactured to gage your reaction. I am a scientist.

You are quiet for a moment. “It probably wouldn’t have been right then either.”

“That’s true,” I say, though I frown behind my hair. “That’s true.”

***

You are not here. I go inside and drink wine, though it’s only 11:00 AM. I drink out of the bottle, and I eat chips standing over the sink.

“This is vacation—nay, this is conceding,” I joke while up to my elbow in the family-size chip bag. They are naked lime tortillas as I forgot the salsa when I made my quick getaway. I am laughing and laughing. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror: wine-stained teeth, wind-wild hair, puffy face, and a man’s oversized hoodie. What’s wrong with me? I had an okay childhood. I’ve been to therapy.

“Oh, I’m unhinged,” I say to myself.

I laugh some more. Stupid.

***

You are here. We’ve left the bed and are sitting on opposite sides of the periwinkle lounger considering each other. The waves heave down the beach. Children shriek, subwoofers pound, frisbees fly.

I am smoking a joint; you are not. You talk around subjects like always. Our real worlds and the imagined. About the women you’ve loved, desired. Your wife. I bite my thumbnail, my incisors meeting the grit hidden there. I must be a masochist, the kind who frequents haunted houses. I keep putting myself through horrors trying to improve my unflappability. Trying to be completely unbothered. Success is based on how well I can hold a placid face.

 You sit with your arms crossed, looking small and young. I see your inner child. A guilty pre-teen in a middle-aged body. You look at me and away. At me and away. I want you to believe that nothing has changed. You won’t. It has. You know I have seen you.

The countdown clock in your brain begins an audible tick.

***

You are not here. I am making a mental list: in a moment I will cry an ugly cry. I will go into the shower and lay my cheek on the cool seafoam tile and let my face contort painfully, grotesquely. I will dry heave into the drain and mourn the end of some part of something. Something that shouldn’t have mattered so much to me but did. I will say “it’s for the best.” I will say “you dodged a bullet,” and I will say “now I can go back to normal.” And then I will wash and rinse and dry off. I will get dressed and start my work and I will keep working until my time here is done. Instead, I lay down on the couch and fall asleep, laughing intermittently, clutching the black skipping stone in my fist.

***

Your argument comes full circle again and I’m glad for it, as I was getting exhausted to hold my face in an indifferent pallor. The ticking continues.

 “You look beautiful in that light,” you say with a sigh, and poke your chin out, your gaze on the half spent joint. “Give me some of that.”

I am considering you. I crawl slowly onto your lap but pull my hand away before you can take the joint, sending Bo Peep tendrils into the air. You are so still. I take a deep drag and meander a trail of kisses from your neck to your mouth.

1….2….3…..4…..5…… mouth over mouth, lips against lips and I give you my breath. I am inside you now. You breathe me out and we kiss and kiss. There are people nearby, but we are no one and nothing. We belong to no one. We are oblivion.

***

I dream. The waves heave. A shipwreck. An invitation. Alone. I see the wound, a deep hole like a navel in my heart that crusts over but never fills, just aches to be fed but can’t be because it’s blocked, tied.  

I wake to the ceiling fan, a three-bladed death machine, spinning above me. Will karma come down on me?

It’s easy to believe that there are bad people and good people. It’s the message in every hot take, in every comment thread. But I believe there are only people; people trying to survive, people trying to succeed, and people following their nose just trying to make sense of it all. I am a bad person, and I am a good person. But mostly I am just following my nose.

And my body is abundant in this era, and I want to use it, I want to give it away before atrophy sets in. I am vanishing and I want to be alive.

The fan spins a hypnotic loop. If karma is coming, let it. Until then, I will have to be my own muse.

 My hand cups soft lilt of my abdomen and below. I inhale. I hold my breath. I exhale. And after a while I become a great shell breaking open. A firecracker exploding. I become oblivion.

***

After a while, we walk up the beach for food. A taco truck, a fry truck. I didn’t pack anything but booze and chips and coffee and butter and eggs. I didn’t want to take care of anyone, even myself. I just wanted to go. So, I went.

“How were you planning to survive?” you ask.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t worried about it until you came.”

The waves heave.

             “We should go back,” you say. “Before the rain.”

***

What is a shipwreck? Is it the end or the beginning? There’s a message from you on my phone. I will not look. I will practice ambivalence. Outside, the rain hammers the roof and the windows like it’s begging to be let in. Maybe if I opened them, I could be washed clean. I could start again. Have I learned my lesson yet? Don’t wish for a life that isn’t yours. I never learn.

I hold my hand over the flame of a candle on the kitchen island; it burns when I touch it, and it burns when I don’t.

***

I show you the painting I’ve been working on by the cottage window. In it, the lake's surface shimmers under the delicate touch of morning light, each brushstroke covering the hint of something unnerving below the ripples just barely visible.

“Beautiful.”

This is what you say when tepid to the work.

“It’s not finished,” I say, like an excuse. Though I loved it before. I take it off the easel.  

You push me against the wall to kiss me. Your hands roam the lines of my body like you’re looking for something hidden under my skin. You keep your eyes open when we kiss, a force of habit. I close mine tight, a force of hope.

“I have to get back,” you finally say into my mouth.

Your hands are in my hair where the words were earlier, shaking them free.

“I know,” I say, and more words pour raw from my guts.

“Don’t wreck it,” you say.

***

You are not here. I sit on my stump and wait for the moon. At least I have the certainty that it will rise. Once, I read that the moon has the capability to control all water on Earth. What percentage of our bodies are water? The fingers of waves revolve on the beach reaching out and retracting back. The purple sand transforms from shining to matte. A momentary mirror glaze reflects the darkening pastel sky, but not my face so I decide that I must look either like a siren or a sea hag.

***

I know there is no sense trying to convince you to stay. I walk you outside, kiss you one last time, and watch you pull away. Your headlights are twin suns. I close my eyes and when I open them, I still cannot see.

***

I remember this wound. I remember myself as a child. I remember how love was a lighthouse glare. How it shone so bright and went away. Came back and went. Around and around.

***

I watch a butterfly soar into the headwind, heading for America. She gets pushed down the beach by each gust of wind. But she keeps flapping; keeps trying. Pessimist says, “suicide mission”; optimist says, “don’t give up before the miracle.”

 I roll my jeans up to my thighs and tread out though the water to the sandbar. The cold shock subsides after a few seconds. The sky clears, turning grenadine to blue curaçao. My phone vibrates to tell me I am roaming. It costs me fifteen dollars to take a picture from the sandbar. That’s the price of being in two places at once. I am here and I am there. 

***

You are all around now. The ghost of you lingers on me. The heat has lifted like a curtain that wipes the day away. I am anchored to my log, which is tethered to the earth. I will not float away. I will not sink. I am here. 

The last of the afternoon beach people retreat now, folding up chairs and umbrellas and shaking out blankets. They go back to TVs and card games, and I am baffled that they seek diversion when the sky is putting on such a brilliant display of resilience—all pinks and blues.

I have not won or lost. I have nothing.

***

You are not here. The blue moon is drawn out of a slit in the sky on an invisible thread like a card out of a magician's deck. Appearing, a sleight of hand, and everything is visible in the light.  Suspended over the water, yellow and molted, that glowing circle signals a new act of the play.  

***

The beach is empty, save some figures in the distance. White tops and brown legs. Or are they gulls? A trick of the eye. Above, the blue moon looks like someone poked a hole in the slate evening sky with a number two pencil.

There is a small child on the sandbar with my hair and eyes. She is not one of my children. I let the flat rock fall into her hand.

“Can I keep it?” she asks.

“No.”

She stands and whips it at the horizon.

“Three skips,” we say together.

***

You are not here. I am tracing my toe in the sand and singing in a low register. I scan my body for a reminder, some leftover: the sting of rug burn on my skin, some tenderness or moisture.

This will be the end of it. I walk into the waves, pulling my dress up around my thighs and walk until the lake floor rises at the sand bar.

It is just me and the moon and the water now. Below I see a rock as flat and round as a dollar. It looks like a hole in sand. I fish it out and hold it tight in my palm, a new talisman. The absence of light; oblivion.

***

I am here. It’s too dark to see now except for the bright moon. I am growing cold and so is she. I hold her hand and we walk to the deep part again until my toes barely touch the bottom. I tell her it’s okay and we slip under the water holding each other.

We begin again.

---

Allison Bothley is a writer and recovering MFA (The New School) who lives in Orangeville, Ontario. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail and Tones of Citrus. She is the creator and publisher of Bangs Zine, an independent space hot for big feelings, emerging writers, and lazy Sunday readers.