Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

With a mouthful of bread, I ask her nicely what the fuck she means.

I don’t have the courage to tell her any truth, like, I already know about tannins. Like, I am no idiot. Like, I am a grown woman with a beating heart, and skin, and nails, and happiness, and anger.

I fight it, because like her, she says I’m one hell of a fucking fighter.

Dad told me what I wanted to know: that his eyes were closed, and that sometimes, loneliness can make a heart stop.

I was tired of feeling alone, even when my father was sleeping on the couch outside my bedroom door. I was tired.

When she went away, I learned this pressure, the weight inside my chest. There was the pressure of missing things, the leaving of things, the invisible weight that felt so thick, even when everything was still moving. She taught me the constant foreboding of implosion.

She asked me to imagine the pit of the Mariana Trench, that place where even humans couldn’t reach, the center of the Earth, the darkness. The fish there have headlights, she said. There will be plenty of things I won’t understand, she said. But there must be paths to those places unknown, she said. Told me to keep searching. Searching in complete darkness.

Not the first time he drove too fast and forgot that you were suffering alongside him.

“You can’t control the weather,” I said. Because what else do you say to a father you are fathering?

The tourists didn’t look like us, and they didn’t act like us, either. They treated Winter Island like a mythical place where they were excused for littering, double-parking, loitering, and any other sin that they could find for their holiday. They stepped on sea urchins and anemones, trashed our shore, and engaged in public sex for one weekend a year.

Your father knows nothing of love, but he’ll always say how much he loves you. Your father can love you and also love the tiny pebbles that roll onto the shore and cling to cold feet. There’s no telling where all his love goes. Sometimes, you’ll spend hours in encyclopedias asking: Can love evaporate?

You’ll ask your father if it’s okay to be that lonely, and he’ll say something like: She’s not lonely down there. You’ll ask your father if you will end up like this whale when he dies and if you’ll be left with nothing, and he’ll say something like: As long as you have yourself, you’ll always have me, and everything else.

It’s not easy to tell my mother these things, about why I mourn this washed-up body. We don’t want to admit the sad things, because it makes us sad.

And he just keeps loving me. For no reason except that he does. And I don’t ask, because I’m afraid to really know, and afraid it might not be real.

I can never say how much I love him. Not even to myself, because I’m always waiting for him to leave.

We said, What happens to us while we are away does not belong to us. Because we never agreed to be faithful, but we did agree to keep each other from ruin.

I know what it means to leave people.

We say very little. There is the moon—it’s full—and our upcoming obligations. We agree that we are tired. Maybe always tired. But tonight, we say, we are full. There is more to say, but after many years, we’ve learned that saying the things doesn’t always clean up a mess. So we say we still love each other, and maybe we mean it, and there are half smiles. I bury my face into his chest when he holds me. What if we’ve evolved into something entirely new?

There was enough silence to feel abandoned.

Enough time to look at the lines in the mirror and wonder if making it out alive was worth all the pain.

The real reasons: I’m not sure he loves me like I love him. And I can’t bear the thought of loving him anymore.

I have the urge to keep driving. Always. To keep going away, alone, without anyone who can hurt and ruin and break and die.

Long-living loggerhead sea turtles often die before they recover from trauma. • Live long enough to fucking recover.

Because maybe I’m good enough to let him quietly love the way he does, with missteps and all, like the harp seals must still love their young after they leave them for the wild sea. In the play version, we grow fins and roll our bodies to the water and swim together, forever. “I’m no good at love,” I say. “Me neither,” he says.

That if I say all the bad things up front, I won’t have to ever say them again.

It has taken 25 million years for whales to learn to be whales. • They have enormous hearts.

I can’t remember if I told him I loved him, too, but our lives crashed together, and even when he was gone, I could feel him deep inside my bones. At first, it was so easy to be anyone we wanted to be. Then we had to learn to be ourselves. To say what we wanted. To decide what we wanted together, too.

What if we could know when all the unbearable things were coming?

Maybe I knew it before, but I’d been so good at believing bad things weren’t so bad.

No one taught me what to do with my mad.

I was so good at participating in that kind of forgiveness, the kind that meant only to be forgetful.

My mother said it was impossible to forgive people. Because a betrayal happens to you right in the gut. That you can’t just forget the jellyfish that stopped your heart.

How can you know what it’s like to lose the people you love when you are still trying to figure out how to love them?

What fills the space: everything we have lost and found.