Tidal

          Something about telling you this feels precious and I don’t want to relay to you what happened, how I felt, the things I kept documented in my journal. The way you lay on the sand at high tide and let the wind wash salt and sand over your face, crushed shells from dead hermit crabs, everywhere pebbles and lilac lobster claws and my heart, draped like a web, across the surface of the ocean. Part of me didn’t want to bother you.

          I knew you weren’t sleeping, your right-hand curling around my left, this wasn’t supposed to happen. When I came here I told myself I wouldn’t open the door; I’ve never been good at keeping things safe. Often, I tear my life to the ground, but oh god, that morning when you stood in the dining room, alone and eating sourdough toast with strawberry jam and I thought, my home. This house I’ve built for myself and it continues to grow despite my urging against, despite waking up with needles in my feet and numbness in my wrists, I told myself I wasn’t easy to love but lately I’ve had this theory: maybe you’re willing to try.

☾

          Warm dining room. His faded winter coat, black with buttons hanging on by bare threads, the way his sandy blonde hair fell across his eyes, the color of surf, clear-frame glasses, all the other details I wasn’t supposed to notice.

          Could this be a normal day for once, I wanted to ask myself as I entered the room.

          Instead, my heart melted like wax. I felt heat creep into my face, thought about saying nothing, inching back the way I came. Wished, those days, to be a worm or a beetle. A small green emptiness. Seconds later he was calling my name softly, observing me in the window.

          We spent November on the beach.

          “Any day now, the water is going to eat the house.” He took sand in his free hand and spilled it onto his stomach.

          “We should form a house inside of a whale,” I’d replied, automatically wanting to push things, to be humorous, to say, I would live in a gigantic fish, don’t you dare abandon me after the land has been swallowed by salt.

          I remembered looking at my phone with a single text from him at three in the morning that

read: drive? We’d gone down to the shopping district and let the car ease across the boardwalk. The station wagon was read, peeling near the wheels, belonging to his late grandfather. The wheels were old and the car slid in the snow but he refused to get rid of it.

          There weren’t birds to witness. Our friends were fast asleep in the rented beach house. I didn’t want anyone to come around, witness us slinking off in the night. I told myself this wasn’t a love thing, but then again, what was it? A little gasp of air, the space between crush and then some, the ocean wave which dragged me under when I was younger. In other words, a little beautiful knife between two people. In further words, risk. Buttons, coat tails, black nail polish, jam, wine, hums, thumbs, wreckage.

          I imagined the fates entering the house with their grey, torn robes and amber teeth, twisting a flood around the corner and steering water up the staircases. We’d come back punished. I knew the others would have made it out safely but not without ire. I imagined a squid in my bed, its tentacles tugging a comforter over its head.

          We returned as the sun crept over the foothills and the house remained, the ocean lurking several miles at low tide. I could see several jellyfish dead by the shore and thought, that will be me if I can’t control myself. All grey-lilac and deceased post-surf.

          “You’re up early.” He gestured to a second mug of coffee on the table.

          “I was having trouble sleeping.” Meaning, couldn’t stop thinking about your eyes in the bright light of the Ferris wheel, lilac light puddling on the boardwalk, beneath the pier I thought about pushing you against one of the wooden posts, I thought about eating your heart.

          He smiled and I thought, again, about home. “Me too.”

          “When does she arrive?”

          It was a question I didn’t want to ask but one that I knew I needed an answer to. Selfishly, I wanted him to say never, she’d been drowning in work, affording us another few days of stolen glances and late-night drives.

          “A few hours from now. Her plane lands in the evening.”

          I nodded, brought the coffee mug to my lips, pretended not to care, failed.

          Stephanie wore translucent pastel clothing, each piece purposefully stacked on top of the other. She looked like she was built out of post-storm puddles and clouds and her hair was long, longer than mine. I often wondered if he liked to pull it when they were physical, did he wrap it around his hand like a rope and tug until she dissolved beneath his fingertips, did they say they loved each other, were they forward about those things? I reminded myself only a few months had passed, and the amount of time we’d known each other eclipsed their relationship. Still, everything glittered when he was around. My mouth ached from want.

☾

          We were alone most of the morning. Sasha woke first, pissed off in the morning until she had three shots of espresso and at least one plate of toast. She didn’t greet either of us, preferring silence, slumping her body in one of the faded green loveseats in the living room. Her partner woke up hours later, almost mid-afternoon. Frankie and Sasha both had dark brown hair and pale skin. Sasha kept her hair in braids at the back of her neck and Frankie wore her hair wavy, like a mermaid’s. They wore sweatpants most of the day, Frankie’s covered in dried oil paint and acrylic smears. I felt lonely that I hadn’t come with anyone but the truth was, since I’d moved to Cape Cod, I hadn’t been able to meet someone I had anything in common with. Ethan and I met as a fluke.

          We’d been at the same poetry reading one evening, a rainstorm rendering everyone stuck in the rundown maker space. Everything was warm wooden paneling and glowing lights. I saw Ethan and his friend group laughing and drinking at the makeshift bar, almost turned sick from jealousy. The only person I’d come with had left early because she needed to take care of her dog immediately after reading her poems.

          Ethan’s partner came up to me first. Her name was Stephanie, but she introduced herself as Steph. She wore a long tangerine dress that complimented her tan skin. We bonded over our mutual South American heritage; I was Ecuadorian-American and she was Columbian. We whispered in Spanish for a bit at the start, me calling her el gran caballero and her laughing, muttering ay, eso no me gusta.

          I’d been writing in my notebook every time someone said something particularly hilarious and Steph was fond of saying, Stop doing that. If you ever get published I’m going to pretend I don’t know you.

          What she didn’t know that evening was that I was stuck until I met her friend group. Stuck until Ethan and I said farewell in the doorway as rain dripped on our heads and we looked at each other a little too long and when he hugged me I thought my body was going to dissolve into sea foam. Back then, we were all just friends.

          We started hanging out in a group more frequently after the reading. Between Ethan and I, nothing happened. Occasional finger tug, soft tug on the elbow pad of my sweater, beckoned me into his arms when we were in the dining room and everyone was in the kitchen singing to Me Huele a Rumba and cooking pasta. I couldn’t look at him when eating tomatoes because he’d always had that sly grin on his face and soon my cheeks were hurting from all too much tenderness.

          The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t writing, it was that I was too busy with obsession and fearful I wouldn’t be able to capture my emotions accurately. Instead, I carried around a royal blue notebook, coated in stickers and faded movie tickets. I wrote down everything everyone said, details about their outfits, song lyrics I overheard on the subway, different kinds of berries I wanted to try. I wrote endless lists and they turned to things I knew about Ethan. For example, he was from Vermont. I wrote mud season, buds, ledges. I doodled snowflakes on a stick, herbs, hummingbirds and doves. After dinner ended, and with it arrived jokes about my pickiness and strange writing habits, Steph joking about the way my ruby earrings looked like cherry tomatoes, I wrote poems about roma, super sweets, blue tomatoes and beef. I went to sleep dreaming of brandywine, gardener’s delight, grape and green. I drank wine and swam in the ocean and tried to pretend I was a person for whom emotions were unnecessary.

☾

          Dinner was a multi-course meal involving wine, bowls of au jus, and bone broth. There were steamed vegetables coated with oil and glittering butter sculptures Stephanie bought on her way into town.

          “I don’t read other people’s work,” she was saying. “I’m not trying to sound obnoxious or anything, I just get distracted when I read someone’s work that’s a little. . . claustrophobic. Do you know what I mean?”

          She looked at me over a glass of Demi-sec, a champagne I couldn’t pronounce with rose in the name. The bottle itself sat in a cooler on the table, dropping circles of condensation on the tablecloth. The forks and knives were stamped with words like avoidance, nothing, and knot. The dessert spoons were patterned with daisies so that each time I took a bite of something I felt their imprint on my tongue.

          “Don’t you have to read to be a good writer, or whatever they say?” Sasha asked.

          I peeled the beef into strips, hating eating in front of other people, especially if I was uncertain about the textures. When I’d finally announced to my therapist I thought I had an eating disorder, he congratulated me. I’ve been waiting for you to come to that conclusion for a long time, he said, but I didn’t feel ecstasy, just small and sick.

          It was something Ethan and I never spoke about, but I knew he knew. Whenever we were a dinner he would hand me something from his plate. A piece of sweet bread he thought I might enjoy more than the braised beef sizzling in front of me. Three lime-green grapes, seeping out sweetness, and a piece of chocolate found in the kitchen.

          “You always do this,” Stephanie said, reminding me we were at dinner, reminding me I was lost again to daydreams.

          “Do what?” I asked, realizing with a jolt she was talking to me.

          I pretended to blow on a bite of hot spinach coated in everything bagel seasoning.

          “Try to get me to read your writing. I already told you, you don’t need any input from me.”

          “I can assure you I’m not trying to get you to read anything I’m writing—”

          “I’d love to read your writing,” Sasha added.

          She was always trying to make things more peaceful than they were capable of.

          “I’m sure you wouldn’t have trouble finding it, it’s plastered all over the internet.” Steph

smiled. “What? It’s a compliment.”

          I felt Ethan’s hand on my leg, warm enough I thought it might leave an imprint.

          “Thank you,” was all I could manage.

          The salt cravings began. I contemplated texting him beneath the table, asking for a store trip later. My hands remained on the tablecloth.

          Ethan and Stephanie never sat next to each other. I had a theory it was because she liked to observe him but he assured me it was so she could feel free. She liked flirting with Frankie when Sasha turned her back. Other times she’d take a lock of my hair and wrap it around her finger, call me Pajaro because I was flighty. I wrote this down in my head.

          Everything went into my notebook, thoughts leaked through my fingertips. When dinner ended, I returned to my room to ruminate but when I went to my nightstand for my journal—which I’d kept hidden beneath a pile of old sweatshirts—I found it gone.

☾

          At first, the panic was dull and awash in green. Outside passed the eye of the storm, the trees casting everything in verdant light and all throughout the house I smelled honeysuckle and yeast. At half past nine when I reentered the kitchen and found not Ethan, as was suggested by his text, but Stephanie.

          “Frankie and Sasha off to bed?”

          “Something like that,” she said and at first I worried she’d murdered them and I was next.

          She placed a mug of tea in front of me and I thought, poison.

          “Relax, it’s just chamomile.”

          It was difficult to mirror Stephanie’s emotions. I’d been trying to mirror her since we met but she changed her emotional terrain frequently. She once cheated on Ethan with his best friend and lied to him about it for months and when he found out she wasn’t even sorry. I never asked why he stuck around.

          “I wanted to apologize. For what I said over dinner?”

          The flirting filled my head; my heart was always between my teeth, my freckles he’d once traced with his pinky finger, the happiness and the surf and the promise of the storm.

          She continued “I just get frustrated and write something about it before throwing it out to see if anyone cares.”

          Copies of her books lined my shelves, each stuffed with sticky notes and ramblings. I kept a pocket dictionary nearby, trying to decode every synonym and verb choice.

          “I suppose we all do.”

          Lately I’d tried to bury my poems. I wrote about surviving, the suicide attempt, my abusive mother, and I only sent pieces out when I felt hostile towards the past. Endlessly, I wrote about Ethan, but the crush-pieces remained in my journal. My heart remained a bundle of complicated feelings, broken nerves and electricity, I never knew what to do with any of it. And underneath all of this hummed my emotions which I had yet to properly name.

          “Ethan wanted me to say sorry. Which I am—again, for what I implied, and for texting you with his phone. I just didn’t think you’d come if I called.”

          I was a sheep, I wanted to tell her. I’d come for anyone, bleating or bleeding, come storm or butcher’s knife, I’d drag the wolf with his jaws around my neck if I had to, but I couldn’t resist, even if I wanted to, being close to other people.

          “Where is he?”

          The question knit tension through the air. Stephanie stood at the stove, her back tensing. I

daydreamed about what her face might look like, tried to guess at what she was feeling. I wondered, if the love fell apart, who I would write about more: him or her. Would I be able to more clearly recall her hands cupping my chin or playing with my hair, the ways he called me her hermana, sometimes nicknamed me ñaña, or would I write about his fingers at my sides, our mouths seconds away from kissing. Something always got stepped in the way, be it my inability to stop apologizing or his fear at what he joked were divine consequences. He liked to say if we were able to actually kiss he’d be instantly catapulted into the realm of the hellhounds and god-jaws. I quipped I’d be turned into a puddle of blood.

          “I’ve always been a little jealous of you,” I found myself saying. “With the book deal and all.”

          “It’ll be your time soon enough.”

          She turned around and smiled at me and a small bit of my soul melted, but I couldn’t tell which part. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

☾

          We left again, this time at two instead of three. There was a chance Stephanie heard him sneak out but Ethan didn’t seem to care. He explained to me he’d left earlier to get me Funyuns before the pharmacy closed. I wanted to tell him I cared about him but bit my tongue so hard it started bleeding, resulting in me eating the snack carefully on either side of my mouth. We hadn’t talked about harm or scars, but I knew he’d seen them at dinner, looking over his shoulder while pretending to search for the pepper jar. There were times we sat so close I could feel the heat emanating from his leg. Those were the days I thought I’d bring up the past. But I never did, and he never asked.

          “How did your talk go?”

          “I might have been white-knuckling,” I admitted. “But she was gentle.”

          “She really likes you, you know.”

          “That’s just not true.”

          How does she not expect anything? I thought.

          Rain slid down the windows. In the distance we could see wicked dazzles of lightning passing over the ocean.

          “We’re almost out of time.” He tapped his fingers against the dashboard.

          “At the cape?”

          But I knew he meant with each other, and that soon we’d be catapulted to real life, only reuniting once or twice a month.

          He tilted my head and biting my bottom lip, which was already covered in a thin trickle of blood. In the distance, lightning spiked along the edge of the pier but didn’t catch fire. Where the electricity struck, a coin-sized scab remained, soon to be swallowed by a seaweed-filled current.