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Initiation: ‘Coming from the Latin, initiation implies a beginning. The related term, initiate, means to begin or start a particular action, event, circumstance, or happening. But it is also an ending as existence on one level drops away in an ascension to the next.’
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Jim had spent a lot of time over the last few months staring out the office window at the Long Island Sound. Thinking. Not thinking. Drifting along. When the sea was rough, he’d watch the boats in the marina swaying in their moorings. They looked so tiny from high above, weightless, like one good wave could take them all out. At mid-morning they were silhouettes, the angle of the sun directly in his line of sight. It made his eyes hurt and he’d look away.
Other days, he’d look out at the Sound and imagine he was swimming. He’d swim and swim and when he got tired, he’d have to keep going because there was no land on the horizon. No destination, just more icy grey-blue water. The only alternative would be to turn back and wait, inert on the shore. Certainly, motion had to be better than that?
Their phone call yesterday evening had ended a little awkwardly, but not so much as he imagined it could have. A conversation like that. ‘Bye Jim.’ Click. She disappeared again, just as suddenly as she’d appeared. But maybe there had been a flicker in her voice that wasn’t about goodbye.
This morning there was no wind whipping the marina’s flags around. No looming wave threatening to swallow the boats. He saw himself swimming again. This time, when his head bobbed above the surface, he thought he could make out the slightest trace of green. Just a sliver. It felt far.
Still, he couldn’t be sure he’d seen land at all, could he? Not after just one glimpse. His vision had played tricks on him before. Seeing, he’d learned the hard way, is not always the same as believing. At least not when it takes two to believe.
He recalled a story he’d read when he was a kid. It was about an expedition, lost in the Sahara, wandering for days. No water, no hope, nothing but unbearable light and brutal sand-swept darkness. Finally, they’d caught sight of a distant oasis and. run towards its glistening pond, the merciful shade of its surrounding trees. But when they arrived at the spot, breathless, it was gone. Just a mirage. Even though they’d all seen it, all shared the same illusion. These things could happen. He remembered telling his mother about it, asking her how it was possible.
“Sometimes when you want something badly enough, you see what you want to see,’ she’d told him.
At the time, it hadn’t quite made sense, but in those days, his mother was usually right. He hoped she was wrong now. He didn’t have the confirmation of numbers. It had just been him. And her. And a single phone call. The wanderer in his head told him to be cautious. The ache in his heart said please.
After hanging up, he’d been at odds and ends all night. He’d been jumpy driving home, grateful that staying at work so late had spared him the usual rush hour traffic. He didn’t think he’d have been able to sit still. Their conversation replayed in his head on a constant loop, getting more diffuse with each iteration. Some of it was a blur before he even got to his front door, but that was okay.
The details weren’t the point anyway. They’d talked about typing speeds and mediocre Sandra Bullock movies for god’s sake. Didn’t matter. Could have been anything. What lingered was that, after the first stunned seconds, it had felt so natural. So fantastically, joyously, ordinary. He’d teased her as if they’d just spoken the other day. As if the last time they had spoken, he hadn’t served her his heart on a platter.
The sound of her laughter was the same as he recalled. Better. She might be fancy new Beesly, but he’d always known that’s who she was really meant to be anyway. Perhaps she was starting to see it too. Perhaps there were some other things she saw now as well. He tried not to get ahead of himself.
They hadn’t talked about it. He’d mentioned her new apartment, hoping to acknowledge that he knew, while avoiding the awful details of how she’d ended up there in the first place. They could talk about that later. If later wasn’t an oasis that no amount of desperation could conjure. All he wanted now was to recapture that moment with her. That perfect moment when her laughter was everything and the minutiae of their lives was enough.
When he’d gotten home last night, he’d eaten cold Chinese food from take-out containers, standing at his kitchen counter. Drunk two beers and watched an old basketball game on ESPN Classics that he remembered seeing in high school. He liked knowing what the outcome would be.
He’d had trouble sleeping that night, not unlike most nights since that night. The problem wasn’t getting to sleep, but staying there. She invaded his dreams in the most random ways. He’d dream of something from his childhood, from last week, times and places where she didn’t even exist, and there she’d be. She’d hold his hand as they walked down streets where they’d never been together; laugh at stories he’d never told her; whisper ‘I love you’ in his ear, as she moved under him, surrendering, smiling. He’d wake up agitated at three in the morning, aching so badly for her that simply rolling over and going back to sleep was out of the question. Alone in the dark, he could make the ache down low subside, at least for the moment; making the seasick feeling in his chest go away was futile.
Keeping his head above water had been simpler when she’d been a ghost, invisible as the horizon. He knew he had to keep swimming, couldn’t, shouldn’t, go back. The shore had moved incrementally closer, but she still had to choose to wade out to meet him. And yet. Here she was. Her voice on the telephone. Saying his name so it sounded just barely like initiation instead of conclusion.
The sun bounced brilliantly off the water this morning. It made it hard to look at the boats for very long. He turned away. Somewhere the phone was ringing.
