Capsized
“You’re capsized,” you said to me, surprise in your voice.
We had been lying in the half-dark room for five minutes before you spoke, our breaths still slowing, our sweat mingling, drying, cooling. My right leg was wrapped around you, and wisps of your hair were still sticking to my lips.
I tried to stifle the giggles, but gave in to full laughter at your mistake. “What,” I teased you, “you’ve never seen a capsized boat before? Or you mean circumnavigated?”
You pretended to be angry. “What’s the word? Stop, stop making fun of me!” But you were laughing, too, both of us rolling, nearly in tears, trying to catch our breath again. I’m not sure you even heard when I said the word you had meant.
We had been sliding dangerously but unavoidably towards this day for months. I’d already dreamed it, seen it, lived it, and I felt completely alive like never before. I hadn’t, though, expected it to be … funny.
So I wasn’t, then, capsized, or not yet. But that day — and the days, weeks, months that followed — fully unmoored me. I drifted, uncontrolled, across oceans, rolled over and over by mast-high waves, and all I could see was her, siren-like in front of me. When I finally crashed upon a reef, my hull shattered on the rocks, and I staggered through the surf to shore. I found myself far from where I began, and suddenly again alone, holding on to memories and splintered fragments of my life. She was gone, like the zephyr that fades with the late-summer sunset.
I still remember how we dressed that morning in front of a full-length mirror. I saw myself watching you pull on your clothes and saw you watching me. As you pulled your jeans over the bare curve of your hips, it struck me as remarkable that there was no oddness, no need to hide, no shame in our mutual nakedness.
Perhaps that wasn’t really you I saw in the mirror, though. I was looking at a reflection of you, wasn’t I? Like Tennyson’s cursed lady of Shalott, I followed that mirror image far, far away and never came back.
What did you see in the mirror, Z? Who did you run from, and what were you left with? Do you ever dream that I am next to you in the mirror, or catch a shimmering glimpse of me in the gentle ripples on a still lake? Do you wish we’d had a conclusion, not just an ending?
