Salt Sick

Nobody believes me when I say it.

They think I mean the beach or the holiday or the sun on my shoulders or some man I left behind in a town with a harbor. I don’t mean any of that. I mean the water itself. I mean the thing that moved all night while I tried to sleep and made me feel less insane for also being unable to stop. They say go to the lake, go to the river, take a bath for God’s sake, and they laugh, and I laugh too because what else can you do when nobody understands that you are dying of something they think is a preference.

I live near a lake. A Great Lake, they call it, which is a strange thing to call something that isn’t enough. It is enormous and it is cold and on certain days it does look like the sea if you squint and if you are willing to lie to yourself and I have been willing to lie to myself about smaller things so why not this.

But it is not the sea.

The sea does not have another side. The sea goes and it keeps going and it does not stop because there is nowhere for it to stop and you stand in front of it and something in you understands that you are standing at the end of what can be known. The lake has an opposite shore. The lake has Michigan. I have nothing against Michigan. But Michigan is not infinity and the body knows the difference even when the mind is trying very hard not to.

I grew up near the ocean. I say this and people nod. They think they understand what it means. They think it means I had a nice childhood or that I am nostalgic or that I surfed or collected shells or had a dog that ran on the sand. I did not have a dog that ran on the sand. I had the ocean and that was enough and now I don’t have it and nothing is enough and I don’t know how to say this without sounding like I am being dramatic about water.

I am not being dramatic about water.

There was a morning, years ago, early, nobody there. October, I think. The water was grey and it was cold and the sky was doing something I still can’t describe. And I stood there and the sound of it went through me and everything that had been wrong went quiet. Not fixed. Not solved. Quiet. The way a crying child goes quiet when you finally pick it up. Not because the thing that was wrong has been corrected but because being held is sometimes all there is and the ocean was the only thing that ever held me without asking me to be something first.

I think about that morning more than I should.

I think about it when I am driving and the radio is on and the flatness of this place stretches out ahead of me like a sentence that never ends. I think about it when the lake is doing its best, its absolute best, and I am standing there trying to feel the thing I used to feel and it is not there. It is like kissing someone who is not the person you want to kiss. The lips are lips. The act is the act. But the thing behind it, the thing that makes it mean something, is missing, and you can feel the absence of it so precisely that the replacement becomes worse than nothing at all.

I am sorry about the lake. I am sorry I cannot love it the way it deserves. It is a good lake. It is a serious lake. In November it is genuinely frightening, which I respect, because at least it is not pretending. But even at its worst the lake is angry inside a known container and the ocean is not contained and that is why I need it and that is why I cannot stop thinking about it and that is why I am writing this instead of doing something useful with my afternoon.

People listen when I talk about it. They listen the way you listen to someone describing a pain you have never had. Carefully. Generously. And at some point, every time, I can see it happen, the thing I am describing leaves the place where they can feel it with me and becomes something they can only watch. They have never needed the ocean. They need other things. Things I probably can't feel either. We live in the same world and underneath it we are tuned to different frequencies and that is fine, that is honest, that is probably how most people survive each other. But mine is salt water and there is no way to explain salt water to someone who is not sick without it.

People suggest things. They suggest the sound of waves on a speaker. They suggest meditation. They suggest visualization. Close your eyes, they say, and imagine you are there. I can close my eyes. I can imagine. But the ocean is not an image. The ocean is the thing that makes all images small. You cannot visualize something that is larger than your ability to visualize. You can only stand in front of it and let it do what it does, which is remind you that you were never as big as you thought you were, and that being not as big as you thought you were is the only true relief available.

The self-help people would tell me this is about control. The spiritual people would tell me to find the ocean within. The therapists would ask me what the ocean represents. It represents the ocean. I don’t know how to make that sentence any more plain. Sometimes the thing you miss is the thing you miss and there is no door behind it, no deeper room, no revelation waiting to be unlocked. Sometimes you just need to stand in front of something ancient and thoughtless and let it be louder than you are.

I miss the one thing on this planet that was louder than my head. That is all this is. I miss it and every day I don’t go back to it the missing becomes more a part of me, like a second pulse, like something that has moved into my blood and set up residence and will not leave because it has nowhere to go either.

I drove by the lake a while back. I sat in the car for a while. Then I got out and walked to where the water was and I stood there. The wind was up and the waves were decent and I could almost, almost, if I closed my eyes, if I let the wind take me, if I stopped knowing where I was.

Almost.

Then I opened my eyes and it was still the lake and I was still in the Midwest and the ocean was still a thousand miles from every direction and I got back in the car and drove home and did not say anything about it to anyone because what is there to say. I am homesick for something that is not a home. I am grieving something that is not dead. I am missing something that does not miss me back and never did and that was always the point, the whole point, the entire unbearable perfect point.

The ocean does not know I exist. That is why I need it. Everything else knows. Everything else has an opinion. Everything else wants me to be something or do something or feel something specific and the ocean just moves, it just moves, it has been moving since before there were people to stand in front of it and feel small and it will keep moving after I am gone and there is a comfort in that so severe that I cannot find it anywhere else and I have looked, God knows I have looked, and it is not in the lake, it is not in the rain, it is not in the bathtub or the sound machine or the memory.

It is in the ocean. It was always in the ocean. And I am not there.