End to Begin to End to Again

End to Begin to End to Again




It was the same story over and over again. It was stuck like skipping stones that leap perpetually across a never ending puddle. An ocean. Her world flooded over. It was stuck like skipping records that repeat the same word over and over, water water water, so you’ll never know if there’s a drop to drink. To sink. To drink while sinking, breathing like a fish, fishing for an ending. Like waves that crash but never end, it was the same story again, and the end was just the beginning over.
The foamy saline seeped and hissed across the tired sands and paused in a moment of realized gravity before retreating back down the incline and into its watery cave, leaving the heavier seashells it could no longer carry to drown in air before the next wave rushed out. Again. The night winds were shivering, the stars were muted, too far away, and the ocean was still here. As always.
There was a girl. A woman. She was drowning—no. Driving. She drove and drove to the ocean to the ocean in an ’87 Chevy and an annual tradition. Stuck in convention. Twenty one years ago it was the beginning, and Daddy had driven them all to the Casa del Mar hotel for some “family fun time.” Then, six, the girl, Sara, waited forever for Daddy to buy the golden room key from the office before she dragged Mommy across the wooden walkway and plunged all ten toes, satisfied, into the icy Pacific.
“Hi.” She had waved at the ocean.
The ocean water had circulated, up and down, sine and cosine, unaffected. Sara had giggled, watching the ocean wave back at her.
Again the next day. Again next July. Again the next twenty one years.
Now 27, like breathing, she couldn’t stop the tradition even if she tried. She had tried. Buddhist monks in red togas could slow their blood, lower their temperatures, make their lungs forget their lust for the air until their breaths came in and out like the warm quiet sound of a conch shell to her ear, their hearts beat beating constant and deep like waves on the sea rising and falling. It was on the Discovery Channel. She had recorded the segment, The Mysteries of Buddhism, watched it over and over, but on her bed at night her mouth would ruin everything and gasp in suddenly before her heart ever stopped completely. The beat always pounded again and she knew that she could not end anyway. She was forever, like reincarnation, like the rain cycle leading lake particles to the sky and the clouds back down into the ocean.
Sara shivered, pulled her thin blue cotton jacket tighter around one shoulder, despite the heat still buzzing out of the vents at 78˚. She was November, it was raining—no.
It was November, she was crying. She tried to not notice it, just like she tried not to notice how the trees were scraping the sky, empty and leafless, an insult to the memory of summer. She drove and steered and braked and accelerated, and tried to get her mind off the discrepancy between the nowness of winter and the usual family beach trip weather of July.
She thought about balloons. On anchors. At the bottom of the sea—no.
She thought about reincarnation. What she could have been in the past: a princess, an umbrella salesman, a pilot. What she could be in the future: a Martian, a computer engineer, a sailor, a surgeon—no, never.
She gave up forgetting and remembered on purpose: she was Sara. She would always be Sara, and then she would die, like everything dies, in the process of life (the circle (the vicious one)).
And Sara’s mother wasn’t here for the beach trip this time. Sara and her father both feared the trip, the awkward silence that would linger without Mom there to make conversation about Sara’s reliable job and apartment in Seattle, about her and Dad’s plans for retiring out to a nice house on the lake in not too long, about how wasn’t it great to go on a beach trip again this year?
And now she had to drive—no. She drove. She didn’t have to. She chose to, but it would’ve happened anyway, or it wouldn’t have, and either way it continued the cycle. She had no control over it. Right now she was going to the ocean, like she always had and maybe always would. But even if she hadn’t gone, it would have been the circle spinning on uncontrollably again. It would have been everything else she had ever given up on: watering a garden of tomatoes in her backyard, calling her two best friends from high school every week, finding love in college, not dropping out when her roommate died of skin cancer at 20. So she drove because this could not end up like the thirsty tomatoes that curled up into festering black balls that spewed dead yellow seeds, like her old friendships that rotted off the vine of her attention, or like the call from her roommate’s mother during Spring Break junior year.
“Hello, Sara?”
“Hi Ms. Rossman?” Ms. Rossman was round, usually happy, and somewhat ridiculously high. Like a blimp. She had made heart-shaped cookies for their entire dorm freshman year and Julia, Sara’s roommate, had let Sara pass them out to the men’s floors. Even the room with the punk they both lusted after, the tall skinny mohawked boy with a lip ring and an anarchy tattoo. He took two cookies: one pink frosted, one red with sprinkles.
But now Ms. Rossman’s voice was shaking, precarious, breakable, like sand castles at high tide.
“Sara, honey…”
“What?” But Sara knew. The answer didn’t matter. It was all a cycle, the same story over, Julia’s grandmother, Julia’s aunts, they all had it, they all died eventually. Early. Young. Too young, but never this young. Sara froze, her breathing froze, and the ice that clung to hidden parts of herself only froze tighter when acquaintances asked, “Something wrong?” The harsh chills that ran across her shoulder blades and beneath her ribs answered for her. People saw the danger in her, but only her mother rubbed her back with a warm hand and told her, “Everything will be alright again soon.”
The cold numbness, deep blue and aching, faded like fall to spring during her semester off from school, back home where nightmares didn’t scream so loud. It came back unexpectedly seven years later, after her mother’s death from, officially, “complications in surgery.” Yes, the sudden pain was like falling off buildings forever and ever and missing ground, but for years her mother had been dying slowly. Cancer, again. Breast cancer this time, but it didn’t matter. Her end was all a choice of timing, and Sara imagined Mom holding her breath as the surgeons held their silver claws poised, not yet blanketed in red blood, and her never inhaling again. Lungs slowed to a pulse like the ocean, then nothing. High drone in the background. A whiff of her lavender perfume. Surgeon confusion: “She stopped breathing?” She let go.
But when Sara saw what her own mother’s funeral had done to her father last July, it was wrong and stupid and the same story over. He was the numb one this time. She should have known, but she hadn’t. How could you?
Once, before, Dad ate scrambled eggs every Sunday and laughed each time the sandpipers crept towards the shoreline and were splashed by the brine when they sped away.
“Not quite fast enough,” he had said. “Look at them, trying again. Look at their legs go.”
Now he had given up on the ocean and Sara knew he had ended just like she had before, but now there was no mother to fix it. He didn’t die, but close enough: a flood of every single moment he had ever touched or smelled or seen or heard the hands or hair or grace or laugh of his wife rushed over his eyes constantly, drowning him alive. Sara refused it, and for a full two months after her mother’s death she asked, pleaded, and ordered Dad to go to the ocean with her.
“Just for a week,” she promised. A weekend. Just for an hour.
His reply: a slow tilt of the head, left, right, left, drawing thick heavy curtains of eyelids, sealing himself from the world. On the third month, she stopped asking. On the fourth, she drove to the ocean alone.
Now she parked at the Casa del Mar and wished for warmer jackets as she walked to the office for the key. She had to ask for the date when she signed the papers.
“Is it Tuesday?”
“No, Friday.” The man twirled a pen in his hand and looked at her, curious—no, suspicious. “The 22nd.” That November night she heaved her own bags up the stairs and slept numb in a single, not a double, curtains shut to the oceanfront view.
She dreamed that she was a Buddhist monk, wrapped all in red, meditating her hardest to break the cycle. In the dream, dreams floated through her mind like mirages in a sandy windswept desert. Suddenly her dreamself obtained enlightenment in a swirling flood of white light that smelled like warm lavender. It was nice, for a moment, but she couldn’t help but ask:
“What now?”
“This is forever,” her dream echoed back.
But forever? A cycle of cycles and then stuck in forever?
The white light turned the color of clouds just before a hurricane, the smell of salt permeated the air like humidity, and, drowning in the air, she woke with a gasp to a sunny day at the Washington coast.
She stared at the popcorn ceiling above her head, 11:24 A. M. light filtering through flimsy white curtains. Feeling the heaviness of her dreams and of floor upon floor of the hotel above her, she grabbed a towel and escaped out the door.
There were a few older people trickling back and forth along the walkway. She walked across and the sands below her feet were cold like tile floors in the morning in winter, but in a way almost comforting, like the sky must feel to an injured bird whose wing just mended. Not knowing what to do, or even really why she had returned, she sat and stared at the changing waterline. The corners of the pockets on her jeans filled with wind-thrown sand and her hands dug deep in the ground at her sides. Left, right, left, she tossed the sand in two piles.
“Hi. Watcha doin’?” A little boy in a red polka-dotted sweatshirt and bare feet stood curiously gazing down at Sara’s tall, uneven lumps of grainy sand. Sara glanced back up the beach where his parents sat, huddled together for warmth or romance on towels that whipped like horse tails in the wind. They looked unconcerned in their son’s choice of playmate.
“Building a castle,” she replied. It sounded like a natural thing to say, to do.
He focused on the pile closest to him. “Do you need help?”
Neither of the two had anywhere else to be, and so nothing else mattered for the moment. They built for a while, towers, ramparts, a tricky winding staircase, a moat that connected to the sea, each comfortable with the other because they had no reason not to be.
“Oh no,” Sara muttered as the elaborate drawbridge fell to grains under her careful fingers, structure to sand.
“It’s okay,” the kid, Tony, said, hopping to the other side of the fortress. “I’ll build one in the backyard.”
Layer by layer of sand and shell were basted on and shaved off their creation. Sara was so intent on perfecting their world that she almost fell into it when water pulled at the sand beneath her toes.
“The tide’s coming in!” Sara yelled over the wind that was now flying low from somewhere far out past the division between sea and sky. From Asia. Antarctica.
“Look! Look at the moat!” Tony exclaimed. A crashed breaker hissed in and rolled up the passage. The water mixed tan with sand. The boy shrieked laugher. “Mom! Dad! Mom!” His high-pitched scream carried to the huddled people. “Come look at the moat! It’s full!”
The waves rolled closer and closer. The couple stood, wind pulling at jackets and towels, sand stinging their legs lightly as they walked towards the castle, the beautiful extravagant castle, with Tony’s tower and Sara’s tower and the secret passageway and all sixteen seashell windows.
Like watching fiery car crashes or hurricanes, Sara could not look away as suddenly the ocean gave a final, powerful heave, sending seabirds flittering as the waters rushed past each other towards the fortress. The sandpipers escaped this time.
The castle did not.
For a frozen second Sara pictured herself, a princess, waving from the highest tower in the castle as the title wave breached the moat. Too late. As always. The life was pulled from her as the waves pulled her down with the rest of her crumbling castle and she felt the drowning; calm, sweet. No attempt to swim. Just freezing warm liquid stinging her eyes, and a moment of panic in the final gasp for breath. But the salt and surf and grains of sand rushed in her throat, deep deep down down to her toes, so far and fully that she finally became a part of the ocean and let go as the castle slipped away. Silent, suspended, no Sara, just sea.
Laughter muffled by winds caught her, awakening her. Tony’s parents stood passively as their son giggled, eyes stretched in joy, cheeks like red polka dots.
“Did you see it?” he asked, his eyes on the swirling waters in what was left of the moat. “Did you see? BAM!” He leapt and spun in a tight circle, landing with feet spread wide and toes sinking into the muddy sands. “It just blew up… like BAM!” This time he landed in front of the adults with his fingers spread wide like fireworks.
They smiled. “Great, honey,” said the mother. “Ready to go fly your kite?”
“BAM!” he yelled again, laughing like the rest were crazy for not understanding the joke. He hopped over to Sara, wrapped his arms around her waist. “That’s the best castle ever.”
“What do you say to the lady for letting you play with her?”
“Thank you,” Tony recited.
“You too,” Sara said.
Tony quickly faded in the distance, leaping from puddle to puddle. His mother held a kite, a splash of egg-yolk yellow against the grey blue distance.
Tide in, tide out. A cycle. An ocean. Timed to the minute in a book on the coffee table in the hotel room, something with cosine and lunar phases. She usually didn’t pay attention.
5:46, now the tide was out, and the sun was setting in lavender clouds like a deep red tomato. Waves caught the last warm beams and leapt like dolphins from the sea. She brushed the stuck specks of sand off the backs of her legs and imagined a god, or maybe Buddha, walking down the beach towards her, counting each grain as he came.
“Where is heaven?” she would ask, and he would just smile, acknowledging a shared secret.
The circle. The cycle. Salt water tears—no, an ocean.
The end was a beginning over.