The Sea, and Other Loves

I have been in love at least once, maybe another time or two (who can ever say), but no love has been as long and as steady as my love for the ocean.  I've been in love with the ocean for as long as I can remember.  Maybe it seems indecent to talk about humans and natural forces as commanding the same type of love from me (intense, physical, addictive, somehow destructive and obliterating) – but the men I’ve loved most have had a lot in common with the sea.

When I was really young, we used to drive to Walvis Bay, an ocean on the southwestern coast of Africa.  Namibia was all desert, and the desert ran right up to the edge of the sea.  But where most of the country was scorched land, dusty and deadened, near the sea it became a cold desert – almost blue – and the sky at Walvis Bay was steely and metallic, the sea always high and cold.  I can hardly remember it except as an atmosphere – a kind of comprehensive, agitated coldness that eclipsed the heated desert as soon as they met.

In America, I loved the Gulf of Mexico – a warm, humid sea, sometimes transitioning into the land through soupy stretches of swampland.  Florida is often plagued by hurricane weather in the very deepest parts of summer – the sky grows black and wet and hot in the middle of the day, the warm and normally placid sea starts to grow white and frothy with motion, and lifeguards shove red flags into the sand as a warning to surfers.  That’s when I always went swimming – I would leave my clothes in a pile on the sand and go running into that storming expanse of water like it would cleanse me, resurrect me.

At some point, I fell in love with the hard, blue Pacific – the most alive ocean I’ve ever seen – a terrible, mighty thing, beating itself again and again on the black Western rocks, thrashing like a wild animal that finds itself stupidly caught in a trap too small to hold its strength for long.  In central California, where the sea is high and the sand is dark and everyone swims with lonely shoulders, I stopped thinking and just smelled things: the faintly dank and mossy sand, the sharp salt air.  

The last man I loved drew out the same physicality in me -- when I was with him, his beauty seemed straightforward, something to be learned with the senses, un-abstract; beauty to be absorbed with my own body, not contemplated or considered.  I loved his shoulders, I loved the long lines of them, that swift downsweep from just below the ear with knobs like smooth pebbles underneath the skin, and the sleek skeleton of his back’s two mirrored wings, full and broad like two taut sails of a skipper.  

In Kenya, my brothers and I became adopted children of the Indian Ocean, sea-dwellers.  In Mombasa, we hardly left the water for days, our skin growing grooved and coarse and swollen from the salt-water.  The sea at the African equator is so clear and full of light and colored creatures -- living breathing things -- and the water close to shore is strewn with dhows and ropes.  Afterwards on the sand, the sunlight came down on us like a storm, like white fire falling on our faces.

But it’s not so much the coasts that interest me.  When I swim in the ocean, it’s always with my eyes toward the horizon, always with a longing to be farther out, to be taken and never returned by the wild sea-forces – consumed, drowned, I don’t care – anything to have the sea in me and me in the sea.  I have no words for the extent of my desire.  

I used to imagine what life under the sea would be like – it had none of the cartoonish-ness of The Little Mermaid – I imagined a wild dark infinite blueness, a heavy humming quiet, a constant sense of bodily semi-suspension; and the light, when it came, would always be filtered, refracted, diffuse, everywhere and everywhere and yet nowhere fully.  I remember listening to Radiohead’s In Rainbows in my room in the Meru jungle in 2008, and how the sounds of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” were the first to aurally capture the strange desire I had for permanent submersion, to be sunk in the darkest seas/ human longings –

In the deepest ocean, the bottom of the sea

Your eyes, they turn me

Why should I stay here? Why should I stay?

I'd be crazy not to follow, follow where you lead

Your eyes, they turn me

Turn me to a phantom

I follow to the edge, of the earth

And fall off

Yeah, everybody leaves if they get the chance

And this is my chance

I get eaten by the worms and weird fishes

Picked over by the worms, and weird fishes

Yeah, I’ll hit the bottom

Hit the bottom and escape

Escape