July 28th, 2014

Even still, in these notes, I hear him, and for a moment it is not terrible to remember
things as they were. This tiny postage stamp city, a moving picture of love and life
before me, fades into its own scalloped edges and I am in a field dreaming of some
boy who said I love you and then disappeared into the wide world he needed to know
and be known by. He is years and years from me in a different city right now, and I
am on vacation by the sea with people who have taught me how to be loved, not just
how to love. Now that I understand both I am ready to begin again. "You're working
all your muscles" Brett said the other day. "First you learned desire, and then to accept
being the object of desire, and then that there was still room to feel, and then you
exercised the muscles of conflict, and now you are ready. Now you wait." It's family
week in Province Town and we are a family, Joe, Caitlin, and I. We make no apologies
for our love or loveliness or the headlights in the campground at one in the morning.
Love, like water, takes different shapes, and now that I have been near the sea, I cannot
go back to smaller tributaries.


July 27th, 2014

There was a lot of talk about the ocean and its endlessness from the pulpit,
and how grace is so much deeper than we know, though not deeper than we
can feel if we allow ourselves to feel it. I went home feeling an awareness
of the depth, though not the depth itself. I lay myself across the white concrete
of our front steps and closed my eyes. I spread my hands out on the concrete, my
head tipped back to the grass and dirt of the yard, and lay there feeling the warmth
and texture of everything beneath my palms. I prayed wordlessly about all the things
passing through my mind. The clouds became a little heavier, and little closer, until
they broke over me and I welcomed the water on my bare skin. I prayed the rain
would fall heavier and heavier until my lace dress was soaked through, and it did.
Ezra took off his shirt and joined me and we laughed, open-mouth and squinted eye,
as the rain fell in huge summer drops. When we were saturated I felt clean and
submerged and even reborn. I rose to wring out my dress but first turned to see the
pale dry on the steps where my body had been.