Ocean (from the Munich Tales)

OCEAN
By Michael Kroetch

She was sitting in the rocking chair, but her heart leaned into the soft summer wind like a kite above the sea. She knew it was blackberry picking weather back home on the island. She could almost smell how plump and pungent those berries would be by now. She could actually taste the jam her mother made from the buckets of berries she and her sisters brought home with their red-stained hands. She smiled at the thought of how one of those tiny berry seeds usually got stuck between her teeth and how for many nights she'd stay awake long past her bedtime probing at it in the darkness with her tongue, desperately trying to get it free. The child she was would never have believed she'd miss such an annoying thing. But that little girl wouldn´t have believed her husband would leave either. That little girl had seen the world in absolutes. Good and bad. No shades of gray. Things were pure for that girl, pure like the ocean was pure. From that child´s room you could almost see the ocean, but always the girl had known it was there within reach. All the time present with its promise of possibility and transformation. She had none of that now. The gray city around her now felt like a big gray endless scab. She hated her husband for leaving and loathed herself more for being left. But worse than that was that her love for him had not left when he did. And now that love had nowhere to go. It was stuck inside her—stuck there like one of those blackberry seeds. If it were a child inside her that would be another thing. She wouldn´t mind that. Quite the opposite. That would give her life some meaning, some focus. A future. But this, this was crazy. This stupid love trapped between her teeth made her stay awake now most nights for no reason. All she could think about now was the past. How much of life was already lost behind her. She sat in the rocking chair and sighed, looking out at the warm night and the apartment courtyard. So many people lived so close to her, but she didn´t know any of them. Not one. She could see them across the way inside the flats where they lived. She wondered how many of them were like her with a useless love stuck inside them. She wanted to ask them was it still love if the person didn´t want it or you anymore? Was it ever love? If it was love once, but wasn´t anymore, when did it stop being love? What she felt now felt the same to her as what she felt when he had said he was most in love with her. She wrestled around and around with these thoughts just as her tongue had long ago tried to free those seeds from between her teeth. She wondered what she´d done wrong for him to lose the love he once had inside for her. She looked into the lives of the people across the courtyard to see if the love they had for each other was still real. She couldn´t tell. They looked happy, but so had she until she opened the door that day and he wasn´t there. She had wanted to go to the ocean that day and not come back. She wished she was still that little girl. That´s what the girl would have done.