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Show needed to stay afloat. It took her years, though, to understand that she hated that game, hated how vulnerable she felt when she could no longer tread water, could no longer breathe. Even though her father was right beside her, she was scared, her lungs confused between air and water, her sides raw, her head thrown back in the sun, unsure of whom or what to trust. The day arrived eventually when the ocean became a source of fear rather than love. Do I need to write that the same is true for my father, of my father? The adult me, the one trying to figure out the path from bucket to adulthood, suffers from nightmares, has always suffered from them, terror-filled dreams in which I slash the bodies of men without faces, plunging kitchen knives deep into their chests, or find my son lying on the bottom of the ocean, white diapers fluttering in the current, or those that occur almost weekly, nightmares in which the ocean is crushing me, the pocket gone, unable to make it to the surface for air, the taste and burn of salt water as it enters my lungs. Twelve. Waimea. The waves were pounding that day, and I was out playing in them, or really beyond them, in the deep but quiet space past the breaking surf, where you can bob up and down on the swells just before they drag the ocean floor and crest. If a wave were to break where I was it would have to have been enormous, large enough to drag a bottom that was much deeper than anything I could touch. Diving under waves for the pocket is tiring. There is the breath-holding and the fight against floating upward and then there is the fact that when the sets get large you must either dive constantly or ride one in. I was in the middle of an increasingly larger set of waves and getting pretty worn. On the shore, I could see my mom and brothers 122 |