Lake Michigan

The water of Lake Michigan is so violent and stormy this morning that it makes me forget for a moment that I am not standing by the edge of the ocean.

The waves thrash against the docks, their foamy white crests surrendering themselves to the rotting wood that has seen winters and springs, that has felt the seasons through frosts and thawing thunderstorms. The docks — whose trestles have sunk themselves into the depths of blue that span in front of me — have grown tired with each gust of wind, have grown old with each family that has strolled upon it, have resigned themselves to living out the rest of their days at the bottom of these glacial waters.

It is cloudy, and too cold to stand in one place for too long. I walk along Lakeshore Drive, letting my thoughts sink into the water that is bluer than your eyes. Everything is saturated with hues of the sea, even though my heart knows that there is an eventual end to this body of water, despite the fact that I cannot see it from here. And yet I want to believe, want to convince myself that these waves are infinite, that they will continue on forever. I want to have faith in the simple fact that because I cannot see a hard stop means it cannot exist.

This city lives up to its reputation and to its name. The wind whisks itself over the water and slaps itself against my face and sprays the surf on my cheeks, as if to say:

Wake up, you silly girl!
Don’t let him weigh you down.
Float free.

So I stand there, letting the wind scold me, scream at me, letting it howl itself hoarse. Sometimes it is good to have something heavy like the truth hurled back in your face.

You are anchored down. I know, because I have floated by you, floated around you, swam up to you and put my arms on your shoulders and said: Won’t you come with me? Why do you want to stay here? What’s keeping you from floating?

I realized it first that night at the bar on Franklin, when I watched the red and blue police lights bounce off the walls behind you and tried to focus on the words that you were saying — and not on the glass of gin in your hand, the blue of your eyes, the curls of your dark hair.

You see, I cannot fasten myself to the bottom of the lake the way that you have. I’m a girl of the tide, I need the waves and the moon to pull me back and forth, currents to take me where I want to go (even though I don’t even know where that is).

It would be different if you had sails, had oars, had something that I could point to and say to myself: okay, I see, I am sure now, I know that you’ll be ready to swim with me, swim alongside me, dive in beside me when I decide that I’m ready to leave this place and go towards the next.

But I don’t see any of that. Instead, I see what it would be like to be stuck. I see someone who is moored and cannot show me that they will ever be ready to set sail.

I didn’t ask you to move quickly or to move slowly, or tell you how to move at all. Instead I said to you, in the simplest way that I could, that I needed to float. I told you that I couldn’t stay stuck in that place forever, that I wanted to move forward, with or without you.

Now I see, you are anchored down.

You want to stay in the lake, because you think that you are free there (you think that you are safe there).

But I am not content with being surrounded by land on all four sides. I want to be frightened, to know the vastness, to feel overwhelmed by the water all around me. I am a girl of the tide, still new to the harbor, still learning to recognize all the different things that you can find in the water: the things that’ll float and the things that won’t. And I know now that you are a buoy: someone who will point me in the direction of where I want to go, someone who will help me navigate my way through the pummeling surf.

Someone that I’m leaving behind in my wake.

We are in the air now. The hum of the jet engine twenty rows behind me rocks me into a half-sleep, the way that my mother used to put my sister and me to sleep when we were little — drumming on our backs lightly, soothing us into a subconscious sense of peace with nothing more than just the rhythm in her hands.

Somewhere over north New Jersey, the captain jolts us awake with a half-sentence about our final descent.

I lift my head up, rub my eyes open (smearing mascara under my eyes), and lean forward to look out the window. We’re north of the city and circle around Long Island for a minute before dipping south and swiftly straightening our flight path to make a beeline for a runway in Queens.

The last minutes of the flight are the most beautiful. There’s a full moon out tonight and, for a few moments, we are flying not above land; instead, we are floating above the open sea. The Atlantic is below us, the city is behind us, and the moon illuminates the water beneath us. We are flying low enough now that the moonlight makes everything bright enough for me to see the tops of the waves — the white crests starkly contrasting against the ocean, which looks so black and ominous at night — as they rise and fall on the surface of the sea.

The ocean is calmer than the lake, it does not criticize or condemn me. Instead, it stretches its arms out wide — the way that my mother still does when I see her on holidays after months of not being at home — and welcomes me.

Somehow, the dark ocean fills up my thoughts, leaving no room for images of you and your blue eyes. And I realize that I have unanchored myself from you. I close my eyes and set you free, letting you be buoyant exactly where you are, even though I know it is not a place that I can ever be.

Before I can even open my eyes, we have landed. The flight attendant makes an announcement about the local time and weather outside. As I open my eyes and look out the window, I hear her voice.

If New York is your final destination, let me be the first to say: welcome home.