The Seas

If one word can mean so many things at the same time then I don't see why I can't.

You don't get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you've washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea.

My mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother.

The color blue fills the entire mirror and, watching it, I think that is how a small northern town in America works. It enlists one beautiful thing like the ocean or the mountains or the snow to keep people stuck and stagnant and staring out to sea forever.

She's not very old but the cigarettes help her to feel like she is.

I . . . cannot fall asleep because there is a foreign feeling in my veins, it is the feeling of finally getting what I wanted, and the feeling is colder than I ever thought it would be.

He gave me an inside of ice so I'd never love you. But it didn't work. You are so close. You are the only warm thing to me. So warm, I am melting.

Then there is the ocean, mean and beautiful.

I don't think you'll believe what I found," he says. "A word, razbliuto. We don't have a word to match it but we should. We should develop it tonight because the word means, 'the feelings one retains for someone he once loved.' "Hate?" Jude says. "No, not that feeling," my grandfather answers and looks and Jude with disappointment. "Betrayal," my mother says without looking away from her book. "No," my grandfather says. "It's the little house loved moved out of, maybe a hermit crab moves in and carries the house across the floor of a tidal pool. the lover see the old love moving and it looks like it's alive again." They are all wrong. There's a reason why we have no word for it. You don't get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you've washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea. There is no word for that dirty water.

Just like the dry land to name the cruel things in the water after women.

Those cuts on my ribs are because I am trying to open gills before the flood comes.

There are two rooms used as libraries, for which my mother and grandfather keep two separate and opposing systems of organization in their heads—hers by subject, his by the way he feels about the author: Animosity, Betrayed, Curious, Delighted, etc.

So my mother was one of the few people on the island who could hear foghorns at night and seagulls in the morning, and being responsible for so much listening made her a very quiet person.

We watched the water between us rushing back out to sea and I swear I saw the ocean fill up with words, like Jude was bleeding all the things he couldn't tell anyone because it might kill him.

We've been fogged in for five days. The fog makes me both love and hate the weather. I hate it because it brings me down, but I love it because if the foul state continues I won't have to do anything important with my life, and in many ways I am quite happy in that knowledge.

When she met my father she was still really good at being quiet. When she met him she realized how she had been collecting silence in a slender, delicate glass jar behind her ribcage. The bottle was not corked and so she always had to be very careful not to spill it.

There is a lot of this kind of sadness here. It slips in like the fog at night. The fog that creeps out of the ocean to survey the land that one day she thinks will eventually be hers.

These are the parts of him I find impossible to cut myself loose from. They are beautiful qualities. But beauty is heavy, and though I’m young I am getting tired from carrying around the bits and shreds of my father’s beauty.

Don't forget that the ocean is full of everything except mercy.

Some nights I want Jude so badly I imagine I am giving birth to him.

Having Jude is like having a dictionary the size of a man beside me. I open him up and ask him all sorts of questions.

Until my grandfather finishes his dictionary, which probably won’t ever happen, the biggest dictionary in the world will still be the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s enormous. We don’t have one. It’s too expensive. Instead we have a condensed OED. The cover is as navy as a bruise. I looked up the word navy in it and found that this word shares a history with nausea and navel from the Sanskrit na or sna or snu, which means to bathe as in the word snake. Unwound language can look like the white cord of unwound brain. It can be dangerous to unwind some words. Jude wasn’t in the Navy. He was in the Army and army comes from ar—to fit, to join, see art, see inertia, the dictionary says.

There is a window over my tub and when I was younger, I'd lie down in the tub instead of my bed. My mother would wake me and make me move back to my bed but finally she gave up and let me sleep there. I liked it in the tub because from the window I could see stars and the ocean and sometimes, if it was calm, I could see the stars in the ocean. I liked the tub because if I slept with my ear against the drainpipe I could hear my parents' conversations all night long, metallic talking that made its way up through the plumbing. Through the pipe, one night just before my father disappeared, I heard him tell my mother, 'I remember how the moon shines into the ocean and the pattern it makes on the sea floor.' She didn't say anything. 'I want to go back there,' he said, and the reason I remember that conversation is because my mother started crying when he said that and I had never heard her cry before. He meant we were from the ocean. 'You're a mermaid,' he told me at the breakfast table. 'Don't forget it.' A corner of toast scraped the roof of my mouth when he said it. The cut it made helped me to remember. So I don't think he's dead. I think he is in the sea swimming and that is kinder than imagining his boots filling up with water, and then his lungs.

Les touristes se morfondent et passent leur vacances à se demander pourquoi quiconque voudraient vivre ici. S'ils me le demandaient, je leur dirais : "On vit ici parce qu'on vous déteste tous.

I did not get a torso of ice, though sometimes it feel that way, as if something solid that once was there melted now and still aches with the vacancy of him when it rains.