Slanting Towards the Sea

by Lidija Hilje

“Back home, all things slant towards the sea.”

“Your hands are cold,” he said as if this had surprised him, and then he leaned in to kiss me. And when he did, something inside me reoriented itself, my world softly tipping into his direction, as if he himself were the sea.

Some nights, I would climb on top of him as he was reading, holding him so tight he would gasp. Wishing we could meld together, that I could crawl under his skin and stay there. “What is it?” he’d ask, but I couldn’t speak, devastated that I would never get close enough to him, that there would always be the skin, the bones, the substance of flesh between us. We would never be one body, there would always be this fear of us breaking into two.

The bigger the love, the bigger the fights.

But even then, I understood that those were only rationalizations, and underneath them all was this: for one to know what they want to be, they first need to know who they are.

“I want my own child,” I said to him. A child I would carry in my own womb. A child that would be conceived between the two of us, born of our love, carrying within itself pieces of generations that came before us, the smallest babuška in the long line of babuškas.

“I want to be someone’s mama,” I said, and when I voiced that truth, I couldn’t stop saying it. “I want to be a mama, I want to be a mama, I want to be a mama,” I repeated through snot and tears. This is what I had wanted all my life. My truest, deepest desire.

The thing about feeling too much is that sometimes you have to force yourself to feel less. That in order to preserve your heart, you have to close it off, deliberately deny it its main function, and reduce it to a mere pump.

“Spring,” I tell him. “In summer, everything changes. There’s a relentless hum of cicadas, smell of wild oregano and fennel. Soil parched, too hot to stand on barefoot. In fall, the dry smell of immortelle and rosemary, dampened by dewy, foggy mornings. Windless calms binding the sea in place. And in winter, sharp chilly winds, piercing through however many layers of clothes you have on, the skin on your hands chapped and red until you can’t straighten your fingers. Salt lifted off the sea, filling your nostrils, purifying you.”

“Seasons,” I say. “That it’s forever changing, but always stays the same. That it makes you feel alive like nothing else can. That’s what I love the most about this place.”

Because I’m always like this. Overthinking. Overfeeling. Overreacting. I’m an uncovered nerve and everything touches me, everything causes me pain. Even pleasure does. Even love.

“You’re infuriating, you know? You have these sharp little nails that scratch and dig into my skin, and then all of the sudden there’s blood where I didn’t expect it to be.”

There are so many people in this square, but you’re the one I’m waiting for. The one I’m excited to see.