Flotsam

The first thing that I would like to say- and I proclaim it loudly for all to hear and without any reservations whatsoever- is that I hate boats. Admittedly, I am a bit biased at the moment, since even a double dose of anti-motion sickness medication was not sufficient to enable me to keep down my lunch this afternoon, and the whole damned cabin still reeks of it. All in all it’s been godawful for a place that’s supposed to be sunny and beautiful. I have suffered horribly at the arbitrary whims of nature, which I warn you is positively anarchic in the tropics. I have come to believe that perhaps I am better off remaining on land. But the true reason that I despise boats, at least of the sort that I’m on at present, are the people on them. Not the crew, mind you, for the people who call the sea their home and who make their lives there tend to be a straightforward and honest breed of folk who I would be honored to be around more if they did not all share the peculiar perversion of living their lives on the ocean. No, I mean the hordes of tourists who pile onto these boats for a week with the expectation that being on a boat will make everything somehow more entertaining. They turn these vessels into little microcosms of human tragedy and drama at a dangerously accelerated pace, and terrible things tend to happen under such circumstances. Specifically, I am referring to the events of the past few days, which I am well aware were unusual and therefore a poor sample but have definitely had an influence on my opinions. Therefore I am careful not to make generalizations; I certainly don’t blame the setting for what happened, I am merely acknowledging that places such as this and the circumstances they create tend to facilitate such happenings. I’ve been lying here thinking about it all over and over, trying to make some sense of it, and I’m telling you all this in the hope that I’ll be better able to sort things out in my own mind and hopefully gain some sort of relief- I’ve been shaking all over for days now and I feel absolutely horribly about all that’s happened. I have, in all the thought that I’ve given it, at least been able to conclude that it wasn’t my fault. The events of this week were instead the culmination of a series of circumstances that go back years and years. For a while I felt like perhaps I had been the catalyst- the spark that set things off, but it’s likely that it would have happened whether or not I had been there to observe it. And I feel like that’s all that I’ve been, really, is just an observer- or perhaps a helpless bystander, and honest to God I just wish that I could have done something, but there simply wasn’t anything that I can think of that could have been done to stop it. No, what makes me feel so horrible is that I failed to recognize the direction that events were taking. I feel that I should have known, should have been able to tell somehow- because it had likely all been planned from the start.

I’m sure that by now you’re convinced that I’ll never get around to telling you just what the hell actually happened- and I assure you that I’m getting there- but before I do, there is one detail that is absolutely crucial to understanding her and how she was set up for this from the beginning.

See, there exist certain rare girls (who I have only ever met a few of), who possess about them a certain demeanor that I find unconditionally fascinating. This particular sort of girl carries herself with a captivatingly angelic natural grace, as though her movements were careless free but at the same time strangely delicate, and the really striking part is that they are completely unaware of their own power. At some point in adolescence this peculiar nature becomes apparent- or at least that's when I first witnessed such a female- and I got the sense that it was a trait that not only were they oblivious to, but so were the majority of people. They were not necessarily the prettiest girls but nevertheless were the ones who managed to stand out the most, due entirely to their delicate, almost aloof demeanor that betrayed something in their nature that was not entirely human, but a mix of animal wildness and angelic beauty that seemed borrowed from some pagan mythology. I found it fascinating mostly because of how fleeting it was. Over time, as these untamable women grow up, that trait fades away. I knew one girl- and only one, back when I was in school, who was gifted with this rare ability. Her name was Sarah. She was never exactly the most popular or well known girl in school, and she was always quite unaware of how much she could have been if she had wanted to. I don’t think there's a single guy in school who wouldn't have given their left arm just to go out with her once, but she remained somehow sweetly ignorant of it, and left brokenhearted every male who ever dated her. And here's where it really comes from- the source of a lot of it, I think- is that she was one of those people who has grown up with every advantage, and therefore takes it for granted. She was from a picture-perfect family in a big house in a nice suburb whose older brother was class president in high school and whose parents are all around successful people and she always had everything- materially as well as academic success, good looks, a charming personality- there's really nothing in the world that she could be in want of. So she's always been- and I'm not exactly sure how to put this because I can't fully describe it, but the word that seems to apply best is sheltered. She had always had a charmed existence. That was what enabled her to stay above all the decay in the world and maintain such an ethereal innocence, above all of the schemes and plots of those around her, carelessly and with complete ignorance breaking the hearts of all those who so desperately desired her. But what made it all very tragic to observe, was that at some point in her life, I knew her bubble would break. As much as I normally speak of people who have so many advantages in life with scorn, I feel, in this case, a certain pity that anything so beautifully crystalline ever be tarnished by the harsh realities of an imperfect world. But her Norman Rockwell existence would, inevitably, result in a hard fall to reality, and that particular facet of her nature that never ceased to capture me with its beauty would die, and I knew that there was no real way to preserve it. None of that probably makes any sense to you at all. Tell me if it does or doesn't, and I'll understand. Actually, more likely, I'll spend a lot more time trying to explain it, but that's impossible when I can't entirely understand it myself. Some things can't be put into words.

Now to the beginning of what I set out to talk about in the first place, and I’ll begin without further digression: I was lying back in a lounge chair enjoying the feel of the summer sun on my face when I noticed a girl about ten feet away from me. She was only somewhat pretty in the traditional sense, and was, in fact, rather plain with the exception of two deep, deep blue eyes, which I couldn’t help staring at. They alone were enough to make her beautiful. I was looking at her in the detached, wishful-thinking sort of way that a male will look at a female who he wishes he knew better but knows he will likely never see again, when she delicately, casually, with an almost bored look on her face, brushed her hair back over her right ear. And that one gesture, in a way that I absolutely cannot describe, betrayed her entire personality. When I say that I have a gift for reading people, it's that sort of thing that I mean- the way certain mannerisms or gestures or any little quality of the way they act and walk and talk is a clue about the rest of them. So it's not something that I could ever expect to be able to explain or understand myself, but something about the way she brushed her hair back told me about her whole nature, giving away instantly that she was the half-feral sort of angelic being that I described above. There was a great sincerity in that gesture, like she had made it as some sort of special communication just for me, in order to discreetly tell me everything about herself, although she seemed perfectly unaware of it all- and that was precisely what made it so beautiful to watch. I observed her as she strolled casually over to the railing of the deck, walking carefully, with arms outstretched to the sides, by placing one foot in front of the other with great care, balancing delicately on some invisible high wire. Upon reaching the rail, with the wind blowing her hair wildly, she leaned forward precariously on her tiptoes and stared down at the waves breaking against the side of the ship. We were on the forward deck, near the front of the boat where every single passenger who stood there did his best Titanic impression. The girl walked toward that spot at the front, dragging her hand lightly along the rail, and upon reaching her destination threw her arms out, staring up at the sky and grinning with an almost giddy release.

“Why does there seem to be a rule that everyone has to do that, standing at the front of a ship?” I asked casually, strolling up behind her after abandoning my magazine on my chair. I planted my elbow on the rail beside her and rested my cheek atop it.

“I dunno, it’s fun,” she replied as though I had been standing there the whole time. “It does seem a bit cliché though.” She wrinkled her nose a bit, but smiled simultaneously- not with her mouth, but with her eyes. I proceeded to introduce myself, extending my hand. She shook it with a facetious little bow, and gave her name as Sally.

“Well I’m honored to meet you ma’am,” I responded. Sally giggled, the sound of wind chimes blowing in a pleasant spring breeze.

“It’s an absolutely stunning day,” she declared, her gaze turning toward the sky.

“Yes, yes it is,” my reply came somewhat distractedly, as I was paying attention to her rather than the weather. She leaned on the rail again, her chin perched on folded arms, balancing on one foot and poised like her center of gravity and attention was the point of contact between her chin and the rail.

“Just look at that.”

“What?”

“All of it,” she made a broad, sweeping motion with her arm. Her voice contained a far-off, dreamy quality, and I sensed that she was talking past me. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” I said, positively mesmerized, staring at the side of her face.

“Just keeps going on and on,” she continued, “All those places over the horizon… a whole world out there… do you ever wonder what’s out there?”

“Most of it’s not really all that different, when you get down to it,” I replied, although I suspected that she had asked the question to herself rather than to me.

“You been to a lot of places?” she looked at me again with that wrinkle-nosed smile that lit up her face so radiantly, and leaned in toward me.

“I go here and there,” I answered ambiguously.

“I haven’t travelled much. Never really been anywhere. It must be interesting, seeing new places and all. I’m afraid I don’t know very much about the world out there.”

“It’s not that interesting, really.”

“But it must be different,” she interjected.

“See, that’s the thing. At first it is- different place, people, culture, language, all that, at it seems like an alien world, but when you get down to it, I mean, when you really get down to it, it’s just people. It’s all just people everywhere, and that’s all there is.”

“Maybe. I dunno,” she said, “I’d like to see it though. I mean I’d like to go places.”

“Where you from?” I asked.

“Charleston, South Carolina.”

“Been there. Great city.” An you know, as hypocritical as this may sound considering what I had just said less than a minute earlier, I meant it completely. Some people, if they’re from some godawful rat piss little town or- worse- some place like Chicago or Philadelphia or something, they need to be on a ship sometimes. And I won’t tell someone that their city is nice if it’s really the ass end of the universe. I can’t even bring myself to do something like that. I mean, if somebody’s from somewhere crummy, they know it, so I would hardly be deluding them. Lying to someone for the sake of politeness is doing them a disservice. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

“Not so great if you live there,” she rolled her eyes, and I was amazed at how she could make even such a sarcastic gesture seem delicate.

“I liked Charleston,” I protested.

“Well you don’t live there,” she repeated, shooting me a maternal don’t-argue-with-me-young-man look.

“Fair enough. What do you do in Charleston, then?”

Sally lethargically extended a pale, slender arm to pick at something invisible on her sleeve with surgical precision before turning to me and making a face. “Well that’s the problem. I really don’t do much of anything.” She paused and glanced at her watch.

“Well everybody does something,” I insisted. Sally just shrugged.

“I’m bored,” she announced with the air of someone used to constant entertainment, “I mean right now, and will this whole trip, and with all of it, really. I mean we go on cruises like this all the time, but we never really seem to do anything. It’s a very nice boat and all, but it’s going nowhere. See, the way I think about it, it’s not about where you’re from or even where you are. It’s about where you’re going. It’s all about having a clear picture of where you want to go and then making it happen. I mean, sometimes, it seems really simple, like it’s all worked out and there’s really not much of a choice to make. But other times, I don’t know if it’s any good or not. What I’d like- I’d like to at least see what my choices are, you know? I’d just like to go somewhere for once.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Right now? Anywhere but here,” she declared, standing up straight. She ran her fingers through wind-blown hair and looked at her watch again. “Dinnertime. I don’t suppose you’d care to join me?”

“I’d be delighted to.” By that point I would have followed her just about anywhere. Just watching her was fascinating as she walked across the deck- she moved naturally, in the way that a creature will in its home habitat. She walked across that deck with the same ease that she might walk across her own living room, and she wore here expensive black cocktail dress like she was born in it.

Upon hearing my response, her face broke out into a grin that seemed almost too much for her features to contain. Seeing a girl like that smile is one of the most amazing sights in the world. She wore a happiness that was uncomplicated and childlike in its straightforwardness. Most peoples’ smiles betray their true motivations. Anything at all false or sinister or otherwise incompatible with what they’re trying to get their face to show slips out anyway. I can always spot a fake smile. Even heartfelt smiles usually contain some hint of second thoughts or mistrust. There was no pretense or hesitation behind those deep blue eyes, only pure trust and joy. It was, in other words, the most strikingly genuine smile that I have ever seen.

Yet there was something about her smile, some subtle twinkle in her eye, that was decidedly elfin. It gave me the fantastically unsettled feeling that there was a sort of higher intelligence, a devilish, mischievous element that was toying with me, that she was neither in control of nor even conscious of, but was simply her nature.

Still beaming, she took me playfully by the hand and dragged me across the deck, a beacon of elegance immediately standing out against the throngs of bikini-clad sunbathers lying about and shrieking children tearing through their midst and young couples holding hands and sunburned middle-aged men who desperately needed to put on a shirt. She led us through hallways and down staircases, running and skipping and giggling and acting silly with all the self-consciousness of five-year-olds, so that we arrived at the dining room arm in arm and breathing heavily in a giddy state of mind. She had somehow managed this while wearing heels and keeping her appearance absolutely immaculate; she showed no sign of being ruffled in the least bit.

We were in the fanciest of all the ship’s eateries. Black tablecloths and candles adorned every table and a jazz quartet played softly in the corner. I felt conspicuously underdressed among the high-priced suits and fancy dresses worn by all the other diners. Of all of them, Sally was the only one who seemed entirely comfortable in her expensive clothing. When she sat down at the table she kept her spine perfectly erect.

“I’m glad you decided to join me,” she said as I took my seat, “Eating alone is terribly lonely. My parents are at some show or another. Are you here with anyone?”

“No, it’s just me,” I replied, suddenly feeling a bit sheepish. I wouldn’t have hesitated in the slightest to tell anyone else that, but for some reason with her it felt more like confessing it. She didn’t seem like someone who had been alone enough in her life to understand that solitude does not necessarily equate to loneliness.

“Oh,” she paused to fumble with one of her earrings, which were small, dangly diamonds that were mostly obscured by her straight hair. “You know that seems to me like it would get extremely lonely, going around all by yourself, around all these groups of friends and families and all.”

“I actually rather like it,” I told her, “It’s nice sometimes to go someplace where nobody knows you. Being alone in the middle of a crowd is interesting. You’re not really alone, and in a place like that it’s different anyway. I don’t know. It’s just a different dynamic. You notice things more. I just think it’s fascinating how people act.

“That’s a funny way of putting it,” she exclaimed, leaning in toward me. The waiter came and she ordered a pina colada and lobster before turning back to me, “We’ve always gone on cruises just about every year for God knows how long. My dad loves them. I always remember having fun until- I dunno, at some point I just got bored with it I guess. Dad really wanted me to go this time because he wants to convince me not to transfer to a different school and to finish my degree.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“That’s the thing, I’m not exactly sure. Maybe somewhere out west. I don’t know. I just feel like I need a change of pace. And he thinks it’s stupid, since it would mean giving up my scholarship and all,” her eyes fell to the table and she sighed, the slow, worn-out smile of someone who’d gone through the same train of thought over and over. “You go to school?”

I shook my head. “Three sad semesters before I decided to move on and do something better.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Harvard.”

“Jesus!” her eyes went wide, “You quit Harvard?!” I nodded and she glared at me across the table. Like her smile, her stare had a simplicity of expression that made it incredibly penetrating. For all her elegance, she had a very blatant stare. I have found that while girls of her nature are, in general, extremely polite and charming and vibrant, tact is something that is anathema to them. If they act tactful at all, it seems unnaturally forced. Yet somehow, this does not at all detract from their charm or poise. The natural ease of their behavior only seems to augment their beauty. These girls are, in other words, untamable and untrainable. This stunning degree of sociability is entirely inherent at birth. “Why would anyone give up Harvard?”

“Just didn’t fit,” I explained. “Mostly just a bunch of narrow-minded pedants. Like you were talking about- I decided I needed a change of pace. So I left.”

“Well that’s different though,” she raised one eyebrow.

“Not that much if you think about it.”

Sally took a long, slow sip from her drink, which had been sitting inert on the table for several minutes. “What have you been doing since?”

“Little bit of this, little bit of that,” I shrugged, fully aware of what a nonanswer that was. “Just needed a little time to myself to figure a few things out, maybe try out something new.”

“Whatever you say,” she said, still in a state of incomprehension.

Our food arrived and Sally devoured it in the most ladylike display of gluttony imaginable. “This is fantastic!” Her eyes grew wide in enthusiasm as she heaped lobster and scallops onto my plate. Overall she seemed content to ignore me and focus on her food. Occasionally we made small talk; for the most part we ate in silence. It was, however, one of those rare, pleasant silences where neither person feels compelled to talk for the sake of talking but is instead satisfied simply by the other’s presence.

At the point where she decided that she was finished she placed her fork carefully on the table, looked me in the eye, and asked me if I would like to dance. Without waiting for an answer, she took my hand and pulled me to my feet, giggling as she led me out to the open floor space, where several couples already held each other to the slow rhythm of the songs coming from the quartet in the corner. I put my arm around her waist and we slow danced. The feel of her body swinging to the beat and the sight of those deep, blue eyes inches from mine was intoxicating. But the simplistic smile on her face, the way here eyes seemed to look past me… all told me that she was just having a good time and enjoying having someone to keep her company. There was nothing sentimental or romantic about it at all; in fact she was completely unaware of the effect that she was having on me. For my part, I was happy with whatever she wanted to give me. It was enough to just be around this creature that I did not fully understand. I did not want to do anything to rock the boat; I knew that it would all end at some point and I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted- to simply be a part of her world, even if only for a moment.

Near us was a young girl, maybe nine years old, who had dragged her father out to the floor a few minutes earlier and who was doing her best to imitate the dancing footwork of the others. She was wearing her nicest blue dress and earrings, and it was evident that she had acutely observed the etiquette and behavior of those around her and was trying to carry herself in as an adult a manner as she could manage. Her father smiled as he patiently tried to show her the steps. It was cute the way they enjoyed their fumbling movements across the room and enjoyed each other, her eyes gazing up at him with adoration and him at her with unabashed love and pride. Suddenly, she let out a gleeful shriek as her father, giving up on her dancing lesson, swept her off the ground and spun her around. Her eyes sparkled as she embraced him like she might her favorite teddy bear. The innocence and joy on their faces was unadulterated. Sally, hearing the girl’s exclamation of happiness, turned around and watched them too, and as she did I observed a series of emotions flicker across her face in rapid succession. Beneath the smile and nostalgic sentimentality there was in her eyes a brief expression of a sudden and deep pain. It lasted only a fraction of a second but nonetheless impacted with tremendous force at the depth of the heartache and longing that it betrayed. Perhaps she was reminded of what she never had- or, more likely, perhaps she was reminded of what time had taken from her. She turned back to me with a warm but decidedly fake smile and commented, “Cute,” completely oblivious that I had detected and interpreted that sudden outcry of emotion. It had lasted so briefly that I doubted whether she was even consciously aware that she had felt it, but it told me a great deal about the state she was in.

After the song ended she made the silent decision that it was time to leave. She gathered up her things and I followed her wordlessly outside, sensing a slightly altered mood about her which I did not want to intrude upon, figuring that she would speak when she was ready to and to force it from her before then would be unhealthy. Night had fallen outside and the full moon above shone out over the water, sending its refracted reflection dancing across the waves. A light breeze sent the warm, salty air blowing through her hair when she stepped out on the deck. Her skin pale in the moonlight, she seemed to glide rather than walk over to the rail, her lips trembling slightly as she rested her hand on the rail and gazed trancelike out over the ocean. She didn’t so much as turn her head when I joined her. There appeared to be a lot going on inside of her, much of which she couldn’t process or understand.

It is human to attempt to analyze our emotions- to trace them back to their source and bring them into context, creating cause-effect relationships and breaking everything down into its parts. Therefore it is incredibly frustrating when, on occasion, we experience emotions that we are fundamentally unequipped to make any sort of sense out of. It is, again, these kinds of emotions which psychoanalysts and holy men and philosophers and all breeds of crackpots claim to understand. The way I see it, anyone who believes that they have figured out the human soul is simply too narrow-minded to see the whole picture, or to recognize that the subconscious mind is afflicted by forces beyond the capacity of human comprehension. While so many fools waste their time trying to put God into a box, I think that the only one who has ever come close to expressing the truth is the artist, whose duty it is to acknowledge that the only way to be at peace with oneself is not through classification, but through expression. What cannot be described with words can be demonstrated in colors and sounds which strike a common chord in human hearts. It is not our role to understand these mysterious forced; we can only accept their existence and move with them. The artist recognizes the chaotic and dynamic nature of the soul, and explores himself by embracing his own flaws and feelings, experiencing them, living them rather than cool-handedly and empirically analyzing them to the extent that he forgets how to live in the first place. If there’s anything that I gained during the time of my life between leaving Harvard and the day I stumbled upon Sally, it was that lesson.

To let the reader know the truth, and I don’t much like to talk about it, but I left Harvard shortly after experiencing a bit of a nervous breakdown. My psychiatrist at the time had said it was due to excess stress, and I suppose it was a reasonable conclusion to come to based on the facts, but the flaw with psychiatrists is that their training leads them to attribute all problems to mental ailments, and fail to recognize the existence of diseases of a more spiritual nature- and it was this sort of complex which afflicted me. It was simply that I could not reconcile the path that my life was on with any vision of higher meaning, and the only real outcome of such a buildup was to sever myself from my previous path and start anew.

My psychiatrist- and this is the one regard in which he was accurate- said that I was overly introspective, and, God bless the poor man, that I spent too much time thinking about my life and not enough time living it. The irony here being that the man who told me this was himself a high-foreheaded scholar who had arrived at this nugget if insight through nothing less than careful analysis, and I swear he had the problem he diagnosed me with worse than I did, with the only difference being that he derived enough self-confidence and security from his book learning to believe that he was correct in all of his assertions, which he most emphatically was not. In fact, all of the other conclusions that he made about me were wildly inaccurate, and based on the assumption that the things that I was telling him were symptoms of whatever he supposed was wrong, and he spent more time reading in between the lines than actually listening to me. Perhaps it would have done him good to turn his analytical powers in on himself long enough to recognize his own blaring hypocrisy.

The point of all this is that I know what it’s like to be tragically lost in my head and I know existential confusion when I see it, and Sally practically radiated it. I won’t try to explain why she felt how she felt of how she got to the place she was in because I don’t know. I won’t even try to explain what she was feeling. All that I can say- all that I know for sure- is what I way. She presented herself almost as being in a state of shock, and she was trying to figure out why.

“Have you ever been to South America?” she asked, still staring at the sea.

“Yes,” I answered. I scanned the horizon, looking for whatever it was that she saw out there that I couldn’t.

“Have you ever been to Venezuela?”

“Yes.” I expected her to ask me more, but instead she just nodded, apparently content with my answer.

“I would very much like to go there someday,” she said in what was barely above a whisper. Her voice quivered slightly as she spoke, and her eyes focused with even greater intensity at a thousand things across the horizon, drifting out somewhere between the stars and the other side of silence.

The ship, in contrast to the calm stillness of the night, was alive with lights and sounds and a multitude of people. Parties of people drinking and dancing the night away, looking for an excuse to be happy; overintoxicated men stumbling across the deck; young single men and women looking for someone to pass the night with; lovers holding hands in the shadows- people of all kinds, united only by their desire to live in the fleeting eternity of now. They clung together, seeking shelter in someone’s mouth and eyes, trying to grab onto the present, to hold on and never let go, futilely struggling to thwart the relentless march of time. I stood there watching all of them, thinking about how the grains of sand flow through the hourglass… how even if we find something to cling to, it slips through our grasp. So we keep our noses to the ground, endlessly searching for something that’s not ours to possess. And it’s insanity to try the same thing over and over and expect different results, but watching all these shiny people pass each other at night under the bright lights- what other choice do we have?

I wasn’t sure of how much I was like all of them, so I looked at Sally, and thought about how above it all she had always been, and how now she appeared to be teetering on a knife’s edge of falling from her star down to Earth, and experience, for the first time, what it is to be fully human. She had never needed anything to believe in, never needed faith, never imagined that life could ever give her anything less than what the promises of the sparkling ocean of dreams offered. She had danced on high with the angels in her backyard and swam through the clouds, and was now beginning to realize that the future of what’s beyond the clouds contains uncertainty, the first that she had ever known.

She turned around, looking at me like she was noticing me for the first time, giving me a critical once-over and then nodding with a tacit acceptance.

“I think I’ll go back to my cabin now,” she announced with a drawn-out yawn. “I had a lovely time this evening. It would have been almost unbearable alone. Thanks for accompanying me.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“I’ll see you around, okay?”

“Alright. Good night, then.”

“Good night,” she turned to go, then paused, looking back at me and flashing that beautiful little wrinkle-nosed smile at me again. Her smile was not at all perfunctory.



In the beginning, I brought up Sarah, the girl I knew years ago in high school, and I would like to tell you the rest of her story- and what I would like to tell you is that it does not have a happy ending. I explained to you earlier the tragedy of their lives- these girls- that eventually they would all lose to the world their innate grace, and often with destructive results. There are simply some people who are born incapable of surviving in this society that we have created for ourselves, and their inevitable clash with it leaves them with the struggle of finding some sort of niche that doesn’t require them to assimilate fully without being broken down in the process.

I ran into Sarah by chance about six months after leaving Harvard. I took her to lunch and we talked a little while about the years. We had never been especially close friends in school, but I had been travelling for a long time and I hadn’t actually spoken to another human being in several days, and I was mostly just surprised to see a familiar face and happy to have someone to talk to. She had changed a lot from the way that I had always remembered her. The more we talked, the more I noticed that the twinkle was gone from her eye and her burning passion for life had been dimmed. She appeared to have aged more than the two years that had passed since we graduated. I told her about Harvard and the places I had gone since- she, like everyone else, couldn’t understand how much I had needed to leave- I was in rough shape during those months and that’s all I’ll say about it. And she told me about how she had run off and moved in with some guy in Atlanta who left her when she got pregnant, and how she had moved out there to California looking for something new. We finished talking and said our goodbyes, and on the way out I looked in her car and saw in the passenger seat of her car a bottle of liquor… it took me a long time to even begin to understand how and why she had strayed from the straight and narrow path of being the A student and the ideal daughter and always the girl with the smile that lit up a room. It finally hit me, after much reflection, that her break had occurred before then- before she even moved to Atlanta. The girl that she used to be couldn’t live in a world that was so flawed. In Sarah I had seen the consequences of such a fall from grace, and in Sally I was beginning to see the symptoms that she was headed toward such a fall, although I knew not what form it would take. Having only spent a few hours in her company I felt that I was a mere observer in her life, a stranger who had somehow interpreted what she had not meant to show, and I knew little about her life or circumstances and I had absolutely no idea of what- if anything- could be done about any of it. I was, in any case, limited to the space of a few days to be any part of her world at all.



The next day I was lying on a chair doing my best, which was proving woefully inadequate, to block out the incessant droning of the family nearby me: two pudgy parents with equally pudgy kids who spoke to each other at a near-yelling pitch in thick Jersey accents, when I spotted Sally across the deck, this time flanked by her parents. Her father was a tall, lean man dressed in a tennis outfit. He had a short, professional haircut and a light stubble that suited his handsome features well. Her mother, who was wearing a light blue sun dress, was a beautiful, graceful woman with deep blue eyes that matched her daughter’s perfectly. Both were good-looking, well-groomed people, and neither of them looked their fifty-odd years. And what got me was that they looked happy together- every bit as caring as loving as the little girl and her father dancing from the previous night. If there was any tension between Sally and her farther, it certainly didn’t show.

When Sally saw me she greeted me with an enthusiastic wave and ran over toward me, like we were old friends and therefore it was implicit that upon seeing each other we would speak.

“Hey!” she barked, standing over me. Her cheerfulness was a welcome break in the monotony of the morning.

“Hey, you!” I replied as I heaved my body to a standing position. Sally took my hand and pulled me with her over to her parents, introducing us. She referred to her father as ‘Daddy,’ and we exchanged a firm handshake with just a hint of hesitation behind it. He spoke with the refined, gentlemanly drawl of a true southern aristocrat. Her mother didn’t speak but greeted me with a tight wave what again reminded me of her daughter. An awkward silence permeated the air for a second or two before Sally broke it: “Daddy, the two of us are going to run off and find some ice cream. It’s so hot out here I could just about die.” I breathed an internal sigh of relief at being saved from having to make conversation with the parents of a girl I had only met the day before.

Once we had pulled away and gained a comfortable bit of distance, Sally, too seemed relieved. “He’s been grilling me all morning,” she explained, “about how I shouldn’t transfer and all. I’m glad to get away from it for a little while.”

“He seems nice enough,” I commented.

“Oh, he is,” she nodded, “The thing is, he’s right, and I know he’s right, and I can’t stand it.”

“Ah. Well in that case ice cream seems like a good choice.”

Sally was wearing a wide-brimmed woven hat and sunglasses that emphasized the freckles on her nose perfectly. She absentmindedly twirled the bright green ribbon in her hair as we walked. All in all she looked terrific. She seemed completely unfazed by the scorching tropical sun beating down on us. We located ice cream and once more I was amazed at her ability to ferociously devour her cone without getting a single spot on her face. She laughed at me as I constantly had to lick up the melted ice cream that was dripping down onto my fingers. I shot her a dirty look and she stuck out her tongue and started making faces.

As we ate the sky began to darken and soon we heard the angry hiss of heavy rain sweeping across the water, an unstoppable curtain of falling droplets bearing down on us with the speed and force of a freight train. The downpour hit head on and suddenly the deck became a writhing mass of people scrambling to gather their towels and reach the nearest shelter. I started to follow them but when I turned around I saw Sally twirling around in the rain with arms outstretched and a broad smile on her face. Her eyes sparkled like little raindrops themselves and when she laughed the whole ocean seemed to share in her simple pleasure.

I rejoined her and in an instant we were both soaked and happy. “It seems like a good day for rain,” she looked at me with approval that I had chosen not to follow the dry but rained-out crowd but instead had remained behind to stand in the rain. Watching her smile at me, seeing the raindrops drip off of her freckled nose- it made it all worth it. She appeared to be experiencing a state of rapture standing there in the rain, and God was it beautiful. And I decided that, you know, some days are good days for rain. So we stayed there, nearly alone on the deck, enjoying being the non-conformists.

Sally just shrugged, “What’s the fun in life if you never get any funny looks from people?”

“This is true,” I acknowledged.

“Ha!” she declared gleefully, “You know what your problem is?”

“No, but I suspect that you’re about to tell me,” I interjected.

“Yes I am,” she planted her hands solidly on her hips, “Your problem is that you’re too damned composed all the time.” She let me chew on that for a second with the victorious air of someone declaring a great universal truth before continuing on, “You need to lighten up a bit sometimes. You act so proper all the time, and I know you’re out here having a good time with me now, but you know if I hadn’t been here you would’ve gone right on inside with the rest of them. Sometimes ya need people like me to help you loosen up.”

“I am not proper,” I protested.

“Mild mannered, then,” she stuck out her tongue again.

“I just try to behave like a reasonable human being.”

“That’s what I’m saying. That’s the boring way to do things. Gotta have your fun.”

“Are you calling me boring?” I raised one eyebrow.

“Nah. But people are gonna think you are. I mean I don’t think you are personally, not really, but you do come across that way sometimes. You’re actually quite fascinating when you choose to come out of that shell of yours,” she rapped her knuckles on my head, “But I’d give anything to go half the places you’ve been.” She stopped and turned her gaze out toward the ocean, suddenly with a contemplative expression. Her smile disappeared and she released a slow sigh. “You know I’m starting to be afraid that you’re right- I mean about what you said earlier- that all there is out there is just people, and that’s all there is to it. I hope you’re wrong. I hope to God you’re wrong.” The look in her eyes left me scared me to death that she really was becoming disillusioned. That’s the worst thing in the world to watch happen to a girl like that. It kills them- or at least the part of them that makes them so special.

“I dunno,” I said, “You never know what you’ll be able to find out there. You might be able to find something that I couldn’t. You’re made of different stuff than I am, and your experience in life is going to be different. I can feel it- you’re in for something special in life. And I dunno- maybe the chance passed me by, but you’ve got the opportunity to have it all. Don’t pass it up. Promise me you won’t. It’s the worst think you could do. Just don’t end up on some godawful boat like this someplace hating everyone because you assumed that there’s nothing more out there. At least take the time to look.”

“Look where, though?”

“Anywhere.”

“As far as I can see, I’m still trapped on this damned boat, or in my damned dorm room, or wherever the hell I am, I’m still trapped there,” her knuckles turned white as she squeezed the guard rail in frustration.

“You’re not trapped,” I told her.

“Yes I am. Where the hell am I going to go?”

“It’s in your head. You’re only trapped by the things that you’re not willing to leave behind.”

“How so?” she turned her head, looking at me critically.

“What’s holding you back? You’re free to chase your dreams, wherever they are. The only thing holding you back is yourself. Nobody’s stopping you. Maybe it means making some sacrifices. Giving up some things. But you have to ask yourself if those are things worth having in the first place. But we’re all afraid to let go. So too many people live lives that aren’t their own. That’s the hard part. Letting go. But once you do it, it’s the easiest thing in the world. It’s easy to live for what everyone else wants you to but it never works out so well in the end, but sometimes- sometimes, you just have to hold your breath and jump.”

“My dad just wants me to finish my degree. And I know it’s not what I want to do, but if I quit- that’s just it- I don’t know what I want to do then. All I know is what I don’t want… I just don’t know what the hell to do with myself. And you have your thing- I’m not exactly sure what it is, but it seems to work for you. But I don’t know what to do. I mean, if I did, I might just go for it. But… where to go?” Her eyes were fixed on the horizon, her face betraying a wistful longing. She didn’t even blink as the rain poured down onto her face. Her heart was out there among the waves, searching the ocean for something- some glimmer of something bigger, of what she deserved in this world, which was so much greater than what the world had to offer her. Slowly, she brought her hand up and brushed aside her soaked hair. It was the same gesture that I had first seen her make- that one beautiful, graceful movement that had captured my attention- but this time it had a different quality; it was the gesture of a person who had grown tired of it all and was reaching out for something to hold on to.

“Right now, what you could do, you could stand right here in the rain, and I’ll stand here with you, and we can watch it come down together.” I said.

She turned around, her lips trembling slightly. “You know, I’ll do that. That’s the only thing I can think of that I want to do.”

So I stayed with her- it was all that I wanted either right then, just to stay beside her for a little while. We stared together at the water, getting our dreams just right and watching the rain wash them away, waving at all the things we’d never be. We stayed there, watching the ocean recede before us, until finally, she drifted away from me like a ghost in a fog. All I could do was watch her float back to wherever it was that she came from.

And the last thing she did before she left- and it will always be burned into my memory, is she looked at me and smiled the brightest smile I’d seen from her yet, and said “You know? I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been right now. I think I’ve found that things are going to turn out alright.”

I never saw her again. Somehow, I didn’t expect to- our last interaction had ended on a very peculiar note of finality that I failed to pick up on entirely until after the fact. Of course, she had intended it that way, as she had her mind made up to do it before she left. What was unexpected was that nobody else ever saw her either. It took two days for the search and rescue helicopter to pull the body out of the ocean. The police report listed it as suicide, but it wasn’t, really. In her battle with herself, one side had won, and murdered the other. As far as they could conclude, she had jumped off of her balcony sometime between suppertime and eleven pm. But as horrible as this sounds, now that I’ve recorded all this, I simply can’t bring myself to be sad for her. She laughed and danced through the field of ashes, and I’ll never know how she did- but I’ll always remember the one time that I danced with her. I still feel awful, but I’m starting to think that she found her opportunity and she took it, and maybe it was the only real option she ever had. Sally had followed her dreams out to sea. She was born an angel and she’s the only person I’ve ever seen who managed to die as one.