Non-Fiction

The clouds are still in. They seem to always be for the first third, if not half of the day. Summer mornings in Western Washington State linger in the low 50s, climbing only to the mid-70s with spots of afternoon sun. I crunch down the rocky beach of Camano Island, about fifty miles north of my parents home, carrying one end of a kayak down to the water. My godfather’s brother supports the other end. His wife and my mother are half a mile up the hill at their house, preparing to stroll down and sit on the beach while we row. He pushes my kayak into the water and retrieves his own from his truck as I make my way out to the buoys that mark the deeper water.

Seagulls dip in and out of view, looking for fish and landing on the shore to peck at crab shells. One swoops down to a crab buoy next to me, pecks at the red plastic for a few seconds, then leaves. As it swoops back up the hill towards the house, it occurs to me how differently birds must understand distance than humans. It makes no difference whether they go up, down, or back and forth – it’s all just like how we walk down the street. It’ll take me a few hundred feet of rowing, labored beach-walking, kayak-heaving, and a short drive back up the hill to get where the seagull could be in the next minute. I wonder if it’ll fly by our porch. I wonder if it’s supposed to mean anything to me, if I’m missing some sort of lesson in my comparison, but I can’t think of what it could be.

My godparents lived on Camano Island for about seven years before my godfather died three years ago. I’ve searched for messages everywhere since then, but I look especially hard when I’m here. I scan the land across the water searching for a glimpse of something mundane that I can make a sign out of. I believe this is one of the most naturally gorgeous places in the country, but I seem to want more out of every beautiful thing. I think about the way the morning fog covers things up and then rolls away in the afternoon. I think about the way the sunset comes every night but is always beautiful. I think about what could be hiding in the evergreen trees and whether people should disturb it. None of it resonates with me; none of it means any more than the obvious, and it feels almost demanding of me to want more out of the beauty that I love so much on its own. I watch as a jellyfish floats under my oar. Could it kill me if I reached out and touched it? I’m only a few feet away, yet my little vessel of shiny blue resin keeps me safe.

When I was twelve, I agreed to take a ride on the back of my godfather’s moped along the winding, woodsy roads. I visited him for the last time in the summer of 2019, after his stroke, and sat on the deck and looked at the roads along the island and thought about how scared I was when we rode along them. Now, I squint up at them from my kayak and imagine what we would have looked like from this perspective, how small I must have looked and how grown up I felt. I was terrified. I had always scoffed at the way girls in movies clung to the driver’s waist when they rode on motorcycles, thinking that it was some kind of performance of helplessness and that I was tougher than that. But as I felt us tilt as we went around the slightest of turns, I held onto him so tight that my arms hurt. I want a moped of my own now, though that was the only time I ever rode one. Both of my parents hate the idea. I could probably take that fact and spin a tale of psychological reasoning behind it, like how I feel that he would be proud of me for conquering my fear or that I would have a part of him with me if I learned to do it on my own. It’s probably much simpler than that. I think I would look cool in a helmet. I like to wear leather jackets.

 

I have always believed in ghosts. I believe that people who have unfinished business linger on the earth in the form of spirits, but I don’t think they’re happy. I don’t think that my godfather is a ghost now – he was a happy person, enlightened and intelligent and full of love. Even so, I know it wouldn’t take much for me to convince myself that I saw his ghost everywhere on the island. I would look up at the clouds and wonder if I saw his face, or look at the houses from my place in the water and convince myself that I saw his form on the beach, waving at me, only to disappear when I rubbed my eyes. I would look at the picture of him that I carry in my wallet and stare at it until I could believe that it smiled back at me. I might even smile at it first, sitting alone in my room waiting for a photograph to smile at me. As a younger child, I did so with a painting of Paramahansa Yogananda that sits above the fireplace in my godparents house. I stared and daydreamed for so long and so often that I can almost convince myself that the image of the painting winking down at me is a memory.

 

The clouds make it hard to see with my sunglasses on. I slide them to the top of my head to try to make out the dark water swirling under my oar. It looks the same. I see nothing but the tiny waves I’ve made as they disappear. I knock my sunglasses back down to the bridge of my nose, blinking the water’s reflections away from my vision.

I sometimes think that I look like my godmother. I’ll occasionally; walk by a window and glance at my reflection and the way my hair lightens and curls in the summer sun will remind me of hers. We’re both partially Jewish, but my Chinese-Indonesian mother’s features are too present on my face for most to assume we’d be close relatives. I’ve never looked particularly like either of my parents, and obviously someone I have no biological relation to wouldn’t be any different. I don’t understand what it means when I see her face in mine. I can dream up many psychological explanations, like something about my desire to resemble my actual parents, physically or otherwise. I could even chalk it up to thinking of her so much that I start to see her in places she isn’t. My face in the Puget Sound is distorted by ripples and my blue-tinted sunglasses as it stares back at me from the water. Right now, I could easily convince myself that I see her face in mine. I remember her and my tween self, around this time of year, walking up the island and picking blackberries on the side of the road. Maybe someone who only saw us from behind as we faced the bushes would think we were blood related. Perhaps aunt and niece.

Loss, as much as we hate to think it, is horribly universal. Everyone that I know has experienced some kind of grief, even if on different scales. Still, it is common practice to offer the comforting phrase “I can’t imagine what you’re going through”. I have no bone to pick with it – it’s kind, it’s considerate, it doesn’t overstep. It’s comforting – to some extent, to both parties.

I used to pride myself on never getting sunburnt. I bragged to my more Caucasian friends in the summers that I would only ever tan in the sun, even without sunscreen. They’d complain of the pins-and-needles effect on their noses and ears, and I’d obnoxiously remind them that I had no idea how it felt. The first real sunburn I ever got was at my godparents house, here on the island, after sitting sunscreen-less on the deck for the entirety of a summer day. My left bicep was searing red by the evening. I remember how confused and alarmed I was when I felt my skin radiating heat and itching, how I had to soothe it with aloe vera so that I could sleep, and how miffed I was to go through such a universal experience that I had somehow convinced myself I would never, ever be affected by. Today, I have SPF 45 on my arms, chest, and face, even under the clouds. I press two fingers to my left arm to make sure I haven’t burned.

 

No one needs to be reminded of how badly you miss the dead when they’ve gone. There is no metaphor, simile, or analogy I can make to convey the way it feels. The literal, too, can’t manage to communicate. Anecdotes about how I go to my godfather’s grave cannot capture the way I wish he was here in his body, and everyone knows that. His grave is underneath a tree, perfectly set so that one can sit on a root that sticks up out of the ground if the grass is wet and be protected from the sun if it’s hot out. I sit on it and talk out loud about whatever he’s missed since the last time I stopped by. I bring flowers and a wet paper towel to wipe off whatever has collected, but it’s usually clean from others who love him doing the same. I think about what it could mean, what it could represent – I come up empty. Wiping the dirt off of someone’s grave and talking to them as if it’s their body with their ears and their voice. Everyone who sees it knows what it means. Taking it at face value, choosing not to dig deeper for a literary device – what do you miss? What can it be like that it isn’t already?

This is the first time I’ve kayaked on the island in three, maybe four years. The last time I did was with my godfather, my godmother on the shore waiting for us. These kayaks used to belong to them. The water from my oar trickles up my wrists and drips onto my lap every time I row and the salt from the water has crystallized. It leaves a thin layer of white powder on my skin, just too sticky to brush off. I will have to shower to be completely rid of the remnants of my kayaking trip. There is no metaphor, not this time. I cannot always find a greater meaning in every little thing that appeals to my eye. Death is far too big to link to something small, like the way that the whirlpools on the end of my oar disappear into the water, or the empty space at the table. Death will never be small. It does not have to be. There is nothing I can say to make it smaller; I cannot say anything new at all. I do not have to. I row back to the shore, climb clumsily out of the kayak, oar in hand, and keep my sunglasses on. The clouds have cleared.

 

 

 

 

 

Celia Shinn is a student at Bard College, and native to Washington state.  Her other writing has appeared in The AutoEthnographer. She sincerely hopes you enjoy her work.

The first time you hear about homesickness, you’ll wonder why the hell everyone is crying.

You’ll be at an all-girls church camp, sitting on a log that seems to sweat from the previous day’s rain, trying not to breathe in the campfire smoke when the wind blows your way.

The girls will be taking turns standing up and sharing their faith, their witness, their testimony, whatever they’ve chosen to call it this year, and every damn one of them will be crying. They’ll say that God is real and he helped guide them through this trialsome week as they ached and shook and groaned from this “homesickness.” You’ll wonder, at first, if that’s what they’re calling the camp stomach bug, but you’ll soon realize that’s not quite right.

“I miss my brothers,” One of the girls will say, sniffing and quaking, “And my mom, and my dad, and our dog. I love camp, but I just get so homesick.”

“Oh,” you’ll think, “are we supposed to miss them?”

            And you’ll gather that the answer is yes, but you won’t know why. A week away from your brother’s fists, your mother’s yelling, and your father’s punishments has been the best week you’ve had all summer. You’ll wonder what that says about you, what that means, but then you’ll turn your mind to more important matters. Such as the fact that the s’mores have been brought out now that everyone has finished crying, and Jessica from cabin four is clearly taking far more chocolate than she needs.

 

The second time you really think about homesickness, you’ll be freshly fifteen in an overfilled minivan whose motor hums like a fat June beetle stuck on its back.

Your sisters will be crying, saying they miss everyone so much, that they’re already homesick. They’ll start this conversation over again every time you pass a state border sign, and you’ll wonder how they’re staying hydrated enough to keep it up.

This, again, will make no sense to you. How are you supposed to be homesick when your home is currently following you in a box truck? You will not miss the fields that made your throat swell when they were cut, or the boys you used to be friends with, who stopped talking to you once everyone else with your sort of body began to wear lace and chains, and fickle alliances around their throats. You will not miss, either, the woman who would tap your head with her pen in church when you dozed off, and the girls in the locker room who would snicker at your “boy clothes” and that extra bit of flesh that clung to your middle despite how you tried to run it off.

You won’t get to wonder about it very long, however, because out the window you’ll see a sign proclaiming, “Welcome to Tennessee!” And your sisters will be back at it again, answering that proclamation with, “I never got to give Bryson my number,” and, “They’re all going to forget about me. They say they won’t but they will. I was going to be on cheer team this year, I just know it. We were all going to be on cheer team.”

 

When you begin to understand homesickness, it will be too late.

You’ll be holding your phone in your lap, turning it just barely so the glare from the plane window doesn’t catch on the finger prints smudged across the screen. A cursor will blink at you from the end of the most damning thing you’ve ever written, and when it finally winks out it will feel like a gavel blow. Like some judgment, some fate, has been decided. You’ll allow a few seconds for the message to send, and then you’ll hesitate over the airplane mode button for far too long while your best friend reads that you’re in love with her. She will be typing, three dots stalking you like the heads of Cerberus, when your thumb hits the screen and delays the inevitable for however long it takes to toss that winged tin can from Virginia to Utah.

You’ll cry as the plane rises, and you’ll hate that you’re crying because it’s a wonderful view and now you’ll remember it blurry. You’ll try to hide your tears from the middle-aged man beside you, but he will see, and wordlessly pass you his extra napkin. The pain in your chest will grow tight and aching like the pressure building behind your nose, but you can’t pop your ears to relieve it. Instead, you’ll take out the pen you stole from a job fair, and to the napkin you’ll say:

“I miss her so much already. I think I was a little too truthful a little too late. Hopefully the distance will help. Hopefully my chest refills, it’s so empty right now I think I can hear it echo. I’ve never missed somebody like this. I think my throat will always have this lump, now. I think I’ll choke to death on it.”

And the man beside you will continue to say nothing, but the napkin will respond the only way it can with: “Thank you for choosing Southwest!” and, “The drinks are on us!”

 

The day you understand homesickness, you will have come full circle.

You’ll be back in Missouri with a hospital bracelet scratching at your wrist from the way you’re holding your phone, and your best friend will be on the other end telling you funny, and mundane, and terrible things.

“I can’t walk by your house anymore,” She’ll admit with what you hope is a laugh, but know is a sob, “Every time I see the porch light on, I think I should go knock on the door and ask if you want to come walk with me. The family that lives there now has a teenage son. You should see him. He’s got the most god-awful salmon colored shorts.”

And you’ll respond through sobs that you hope she thinks are laughter.

“Sorry I couldn’t be there,” And you’ll beg your voice not to shake, “I— I planned to come back, at some point,” Because you feel like you might be lying, “It’s just, well, they moved before I got the chance. I wish— I wish you were here. You and Alex. We have a new trampoline, and this time it’s not under an oak tree.”

“I hated those acorns,” She’ll sniff, “They always managed to roll right under the ball of your foot. Pretty sure one cut me once.”

“Yeah,” You’ll quake, “They were the worst.”

And when you hang up, an hour later, you will realize three things: One, you’re still in love with her. Two, you now understand what it means to be homesick. Three, you wish you had more practice. You wish that you’d learned how to do it sooner, because tonight it feels impossible, and your chest is still echoing like it did on that plane, and you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to offer it something in the shape of home again.

 

 

E.M. Wittlock is an emerging author with an interest in all things beautiful, terrible, and especially, strange. She produces a variety of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry belonging to a wide array of genres, but especially realistic fiction, surreal fiction, and creative nonfiction.

 

Mom, it’s so difficult, almost agonizing, to write about you. I have not the slightest idea what this will turn out to be, these feeble words you will never read. A reconciliation? A self-deception? A bitter-tasting love story? I do not know. But words are my only salvation, so I will write on.

Your love for me when I was still very small was inscrutable. You loved me profusely, showered me with stylish little clothes that matched yours in color, shelves of Barbie dolls that sparked envy in my friends, piles of picture books promising fantastical worlds that I could visit any time. Your love was measured by material abundance.

Dad was away, and when he occasionally came back, he got drunk and then hit you. I used to hide every bottle in the house. I learned at too young an age how that pungent liquid turns his sober reticence into intoxicated violence, liberating the monstrosity in his repressed subconscious. I remember the shattered TV table and bedroom door. On many Kindergarten nights, those fights smothered by a frenzied, dipsomaniac heat were the waking nightmare before I could submit myself to sleep. I now understand how you must have felt, Mom. Your dear, familiar life was fast disintegrating like shreds of paper caught in a whirlwind while you sat crying at the void in its center, the black rivers of ruined make-up running down your pretty face.

And so your anger welled up in you. You had to redirect it or you would have exploded. And there I was, only three, a willful, vulnerable existence. Me spilling a small spoon of porridge onto my white, exquisite little top would infuriate you so that the air in the living room would congeal like clotted blood. I would wake up with bruises, and you would be sorry all over again. In fact, so sorry you would seem a little lost, as if you had not yet been acquainted with the maternal facet of your fragile being. Sharing a bed with you, my nights were overshadowed by your volatile moods. On your jovial days you would hold me, but sometimes when I had trouble falling asleep late at night, I could once again smell the blood clotting in you, despite subduing my breathing and minimizing my bodily movements. There I lay, like a miniature corpse beside you, so you would be tricked into thinking that I had fallen asleep, so you would not start waging wars against me.

As I grew up, I read voraciously, became the best in school, and retreated into my inner, private space. I stopped being that ebullient child you did not know how to love. I scarcely talked to you, fleeing instead to faraway realities in books and music. The impenetrable wall between us started growing then, while our realities fast became two separate, detached realms veiled from one another.

You did not care for my reticence – you said it was cold heartlessness. Maybe it was. You said I felt ashamed of you for not knowing as much as I did. Maybe I did. You said I wished you dead so I could get rid of you for good. Maybe the thought flickered for an instant before extinguishing itself, but I had long lost the desire to defend myself against your irrational temper and your incomplete heart.

Yet you were much placated by the taming passage of years. Seeing your wrinkled face in the mirror, you felt melancholic for my lost childhood which had soundlessly slipped through your fingers, no longer to be grasped, impossible to be rewritten. So you redeveloped your language of love into a continuous, substantial presence in my life. In those deep, nightly hours when my only salvation was soaking my mind in the melancholic waters of gentle rock songs, you would always, always break that spell, bringing with you the reality that I was running away from. You seemed intimidated by my ruminative nature, as if it were my deep thoughts, inaccessible to you, that sundered our unity. You feared that I would study literature and become a writer, using my weaponised pen against you, writing words you couldn’t decipher. How ironic. You don’t know English, yet here I am, documenting us. You will never read it, Mom, this is a letter that drowns in its unsent, rotting solitude.

Perhaps you already know this too well — when I went abroad for high school, I was also running away from you. As I left, my silent absence at home became a final statement of our failed relationship. Yet in those first months when even a glimpse of strange families dining or walking on the street would make me break into tears, pained as I was by my rootless state, I would call you at night. Calls interspersed with silences that neither of us knew how to fill. I tried to get to know you, the person you were. But you uttered sweet nothings that reverberated feebly in my mind before dissolving away. You sounded hollow, lost, as if words evaded you. So I realized, with sadness, that I could not know you. You were a stranger even to yourself.

How could you love me properly, then?

But what defines love, multi-dimensional as it is?

Our love is more genetic than learned. It is the bond of heredity and unconditionality that bridges our chasmic disparateness. On those quiet afternoons at home where neither of us spoke much except for some innocuous small talk – under that spell of banal stillness – we are restored to being, simply, mother and daughter.

Perhaps someday, just perhaps, I will see your brokenness in a loving light, understand you without judging you, and we can bridge that chasm between us by doing something we both love. Gardening, perhaps? In the glow of floral radiance and the refreshing smell of rain-washed soil, maybe we’ll understand our flawed nature. Maybe I can even help you find the pieces of you that you don’t know are lost. Maybe.

 

 

 

 

Jingyi is in her last year of high school in Singapore. She is a lover of stream-of-consciousness narratives, particularly To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. She can often be found dreaming of a parallel reality, caught in minor existential crises, or wondering what movie to watch on Friday night. She aspires to be a nonfiction writer in the future.

I met Amy in the place where many great love stories blossomed: a Jewish overnight camp. She was ten years old, the kind of person that radiated confidence in a way I never could. She was a dancer and an actress; she loved animals and music and books; she had every color of nail polish, and she could french braid anyone’s hair. At eleven years old, I decided that I had to hate her. I hated how effortless she was, how gawky and unwieldy my body felt next to hers. I hated the way she always knew the perfect thing to say in every situation, the way she never yelled or cried. I hated the way she always talked about boys, the ease with which she understood herself and the world around her. I hated her, and even so, she was the kindest person I’d ever met. She took my scowling in stride, asked to braid my hair and paint my nails, grabbed my hands and danced with me at song session. She taught me how to make friendship bracelets and caught lightning bugs for me, cradling them in her small hands. She was kind, generous, beautiful, and I had to hate her, because the alternative was too terrifying to think about.

Looking back at that first summer, it is obvious now that my hatred of Amy was more about me than anything else. I was young and awkward, so deep in the closet that I didn’t even know that I was in the closet at all. I realize now that I didn’t ever hate Amy or her braids or her friendship bracelets – hatred was simply more digestible than what I felt for her. I couldn’t put a name to the pang I felt in my stomach when she grabbed my hands or the ache in my chest when she talked about the boys in the other cabins. It was easier to call these things disgust or jealousy than to see them for what they truly were because if I admitted that those feelings were love, then what did that make me?

To this day, I still struggle to describe what I feel for Amy. I don’t understand why, eight years later, I still feel the indent of her in my life. I don’t know why I think of her when my friends talk about their first kisses, their first relationships, their first heartbreaks when she was none of those things to me. I think of that summer, of that blur of mosquito-bitten legs and nail polish and the hum of cicadas, and I am an eleven-year-old girl, afraid of her own shadow once again. Maybe these feelings are girlhood; maybe to become a woman, we all must feel that pang in our chest at another hand in our own, that unspoken longing. Maybe love is as simple as lightning bugs and french braids.

 

 

 

 

Annie Wyner (she/her) is a student at Oberlin College, where she is pursuing her BA in Comparative Literature. She is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where she lives with her parents, twin brother, and dog.