awakening on the mediterranean

the weight of wanting: power, desire, imbalance, and other ghosts

Jakub Schikaneder - Drowned 1893 Museum Quality Oil Painting Reproduction

Laid there, seething. Felt the heat on my chest as I remembered you, and couldn’t discern if it was chest burn or the sun furiously dancing upon it. Awakening from a dream, I felt dry and full. I had been in the sea for hours prior and let the saltwater find its way around my body, poetry in motion. Squinting into the depths, I stood alone, intermittently submerging the fullness of my frame in and out of the water to quench the heat singeing my skin. Pivoting in the sea, I followed the laughter, the giggling of children running around with no other aim than to catch one another, boys chasing girls, and more often, girls chasing boys.

Squinting still, I gazed upon the realization that we never stop being children. There’s a saying in elderly care: “twice a child, once an adult”. I no longer buy it. Living in this body at twenty-four, it’s all the more clear to me watching the little girls chase the boys along the seaside, that the “adult” I’m supposed to be now, doesn’t exist in the way she’s supposed to. Rumor has it, you stop chasing boys when your frontal lobe closes. I’m not buying that either.

Chasing an apparition I gave power to. Always wanting more from you than you could give me, and you always wanting more from me. A power imbalance, disproportionate desires. Does the little girl chase the boy around the umbrellas because she knows she can apprehend him, or because she knows she can’t?

I lay-float. I’m tired, lazy. Moving a small crab off the side of my towel and dusting a little sand off my toes. I ask myself what brings a woman to a place like this. Not geographically, of course, that part, to me, is no mystery. But mentally, spiritually, I wonder what events must take place to become so hopeful and disillusioned, traumatized and ever-wincing. I think of you often and call you by name. I grip my wheel tightly on average days, bringing to mind how many of those days I have offered to you, straight out of my palm, just for you to ruin them. I think I could have loved you, and yet I’m pleased I never did. Saved me from something, saved me from you, saved me from myself; considering there was a point I wanted you more than I wanted myself. And don’t you dare call it love. It was anything but. It was: a power imbalance, disproportionate desires.

Could you have loved me? To this day, it puzzles me what exactly it was you wanted from me. I have the facts: you wanted children now, I wanted a degree. You wanted a housewife, I wanted to start my life for the first time without that. I wanted time, you wanted haste. I would lie in bed and think something was terribly wrong with me for this. Think about Leda’s line in Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter”: “I’m an unnatural mother”. Wonder if I’d bring a plague on you and your household. It was a good day when I realized I bore no plague. I only wanted to live differently from what you wanted me to. Was it just time that you were against, or me? Is time the scapegoat?

I waded my body through the water to go back to my pool towel, jagged, exhausted. I lay on my back, saw red through my eyelids, left the sand on my legs, and entered a dream. I lay in the same position, a sandless body, all alone on the beach. I jolted up to scream, and nothing came out. All I could muster was breath. You appeared, coming up from the water with a wife. She was everything I imagined you wanted, while you kept me around and tried to change me, until you decided to leave. And as abruptly as you left, I imagined the woman in this dream must be the one from real life.

Seldom does anyone have that much self-control to stay alone. So the morning you left, discarded me, your absence was not what hurt the most, but the fact that another woman was filling mine. And here she is, at your side. She looks coy. You like those types. And suddenly I can hear a baby crying. My heart races and my eyes dart around to find where the crying is coming from, not from a maternal instinct, but because I can hear it is yours. My ears can hear that she could give you what you wanted now, and she delivered.

I feel naked sitting there, then. We both got what we wanted, but you haunt my narrative because I am constantly imagining how, when you get your dream and enter the world, the world will deem you successful, and not the woman who is happily single. I will become the “spinster,” and people will wonder where my ring is, where my husband is, where my children are. And they’ll stare at me with pity in their eyes as I explain that the opportunity had come, but I did not want it at that time. No one wants to give me time. And all the while, you will be society’s Superman – man, and father of the year. Enjoy it, dear, it’s everything you wanted.

My eyes blink open quietly, dryly. And at this remembrance of you, I can feel the heat on my chest, and you are nowhere to be seen. Rolling up into a ball, I consider that we both got what we wanted, and it has nothing to do with me if people think I’m lesser than for what I desire. I walk free from this power imbalance, disproportionate desire. No more chasing boys around umbrellas, waiting to change myself, just this – just where I am, getting up with my feet planted in sand.