The Oceans in Me.

I live beside the water, and find that I'm wet more often that I'm not. Walking two dogs along the coast a couple times a day, it's the ocean I find myself talking to when there's nobody else around. The pulse of its waves, for me, is home. 

Finding myself in unknown waters, I've always known which way to turn. I'm not a sailor, but I come from a maritime family on my mother's side. Cramped around melamine tables, coring apples to stew under their trailerpark awning, I feel at home on granite sand beaches and climbing the pine trees that grow along the coast. I know the names of knots, intimately.

Walking beside the ocean, I feel the closest thing to what my grandmother's rocking hand would have felt like if it had, indeed, rocked me. I wouldn't know. My mother was youngest of seven children, the furthest planet spun around a sun worn down long before I washed ashore. My grandmother died of alcohol-induced pneumonia in 1981. My grandfather put a shotgun in his mouth a couple years before that and survived , only to die of cancer a few years later.

I'm not sure that my family tree ever really dried out. Saltmarshes don't do that.

These days, I find myself staring for hours at the framed photo I've hung just a little too high in my apartment hallway. Gallery Height, I'm told by well-meaning visitors, is lower than this but further up the wall feels right to me. There's something quietly private that I feel when I look my grandparents in the eye. It's a soothsaying act, reaching back at them.

Standing hip to hip, connected in seeming complicity, they smile widely out from the backyard of a house with a large hedge. It's my Auntie Donna's wedding in the photo, I'm told. There's an address written on the back for some place in Richmond near the docks. Some days I can identify my own writing in the graphite scrawl, but others I could swear I can smell somebody else's fist through the letters. 

I was asked recently if I expect to go bald, whatever that really means. It's on your mother's side, the saying goes and so I found this photo to look down through the glass at just how far my grandfather's hair had, in fact, receded. I never knew the man and I've only just recently come to terms with my own manhood, per se, so the thought had never occurred to me to trace my own features in his. 

I'm thirty-six this winter, and my own hairline hasn't ebbed at all, only widened. My face has changed significantly since I began to face toward the winds in my life rather than away, and I haven't exactly recognized who I've come to resemble. But now I blink tears out of my eyes because I see him there, deep in an embrace I can only guess at. My own hairline, warped by time and family ties, mirrored clearly back at me. 

In some ways, I feel like I stand a chance at guessing how his wife, my grandmother, would have been. Several of my mother's sisters graced my young life, and I'm still grateful to love my Auntie Karen in this life alongside my mother, most watery among them. The men in my mother's family, however, sailed on different tides than I did.

Off camera, just outside the frame, is my Uncle Art. My sister, beautiful Paige, had a close relationship with him towards the end of his life, and memorialized him with a beautiful compass rose and anchor tattoo. Working on ships up and down the West Coast, my mother's family slipped from town to town to accommodate my grandfather's marine electricianship. Arthur, his son, was my mother's eldest brother, and became a plumber himself. I can personally attest to how smoothly the pipes worked at his and my aunt's place up the coast. The waters my uncle sailed in and the queer ones I do never meaningfully mingled in this life, so I haven't yet found my reflection in his own brow, but I suppose if I look closely it's there too. 

My mother's second brother, Don, had a motorbike and a daughter named after the sky. I may have met him a couple of times as a boy, when seeing a man with long hair felt auspicious. Replaying those memories to find his face, jawline or voice feels like listening to an empty seashell for hope of an ocean's song. But the cold hard fact is that Don burned bright while he lived and found his end before I could find him at all. 

All this to say: I'm grateful for the woven web of relationships and kin that enfold me, but I notice that so many of my own relatives– the men I take after– are only here in spirit. Like sailing at night under dark skies, I hear my own laugh, distinct in its baritone thrust, and I wonder how softly the water ripples, hearing it again. My voice is known here, has been known here. I'm only just now coming up for air.