Image courtesy of David Knight Jr.

—-

I am afraid of the water. I’m surrounded on this rock by it, and made of it, and taste it on my cheek when I cry, but it terrifies me. I almost drowned twice, and I don’t know if a third time will be so charming for me.

When I was a little over two months old, my mother lost her mind and tried to give us both a burial at sea. I was a hard baby. She tells people that to this day. I was sick and fussy and hard. The cries in her head day and night turned into sharp, stringy music, and then hissing whispers that said softly, “Just make it stop.” One day, she wrapped me in a little yellow blanket and walked down the long road to Hull Bay. It’s not the kind of place you swim. It’s rocky and full of cold high waves. She stepped onto the slippery sandstone and started wading out. The waves caught us, enveloped us in their blue arms, and pulled us under. A fisherman was coming in on his dingy and started to realize what was happening. He yelled hysterically to my mother, he begged her to stop, but all she could hear was the calm of the sea. He dove in, fully clothed, and made his way to her spiraling body. He pulled her limp figure up above the surface so she could breathe. His eyes scanned frantically from left to right looking for me. The ocean had already whisked me away. He didn’t give up. He dragged my mother to shore and dove back in to find me. The yellow of the blanket gleamed in the sun on top of the clear blue water and caught his eye. He swam to me through the choppy water and grabbed me up before I could be swallowed again. He trudged out of the water, weighed down by his heavy soaked clothes. My mother’s hollow eyes looked up at me in the fisherman’s arms from where she lay on the sand, “I finally got her to sleep. The ocean sang her a lullaby.”

I don’t know how I survived the second time. My family was on St. John for the day— cousins, aunts, uncles, everybody. I was around 13. We decided to walk around the trails near Ram’s Head— me and a few cousins my age. The winds are high up there. You can kind of feel like you’re flying for a little bit if you close your eyes. The sky was bright orange and faded to a hazy red near where it met the water. My curiosity took me down to the cliffs to see the view. I closed my eyes, just for a second, to fly, and a whisper from the wind blew me down toward the waiting sea. I felt the air knocked from me when my body slapped the water. I heard the thud, then silence and darkness. When the stun faded, I opened my eyes to whooshing blue surrounding me. Everything slowed down. I could hear my own heartbeat. I didn’t fight for the sky. Stillness came over me as I hovered under the surface. An old voice whispered to me, “I’m going to take you East, to home. Come with me.” I closed my eyes and let her lead me. “Your home is East,” she repeated, “Let me guide you there.” I floated through days and weeks in familiar far waters as she pulled me with her. Finally, I saw the sun cresting over a bay in thin blue morning light and I knew I was home. The dim sunlight illuminated a small door waiting for me at the shore. As I prepared to step out of the water and onto the familiar beach I had never seen with my own eyes, I felt a tugging at my ankle. I kicked against the strange hand and surged to get to the shore, but it latched on tighter and dragged me back beneath the dark water and up to the surface at the foot of Ram’s Head. My lungs burned in my tightened chest as I coughed up sea foam and gulped for air.

I am afraid of the water, of what I might find in it. I want to go back to that familiar beach and let the old voice guide me, but I’m not ready to drown a third time. I don’t go down to the water. I don’t even let my feet touch its sands. It could free me, but I let it shackle me instead to this rock. It could carry me beyond this place, but I let it circumscribe me. Maybe I was meant to be carried away by the ocean. My mother maybe wasn’t so crazy after all. The sea beckons me. It calls me by name and draws me to its shores. It has something to show me in the East, my home, the familiar beaches that I’ve never seen, the dark blue enveloping embrace that feels like a mother’s love.

Sometimes I lay in the dark and cup my hands over my ears so I can hear the ocean again. I lay there with my eyes closed and imagine what it will be like, the day I lay my fear on the sand along with my clothes and shoes and listen to the ocean whisper to me again. The strong, swirling arms wrap around me and pull me under slowly. I hear a soft drumming and a chanting song in a language I don’t recognize, but I know I’ve heard the melody before. And I understand. All of the words make sense to me. They say,“Welcome home, daughter. Welcome home from those faraway shores.” A million fluid hands under the surface keep passing me off, one by one, carrying me in unison so I can reach the other side. And I travel through the days and weeks, sun and moonlight, clouds and constellations, until the hands finally lift me up and deposit me on the shore I was pulled from. A little bird comes to me instinctively and guides me to the door I’ve been dreaming of and running from. My bare feet walk the distance across the warm sand and pass over stone steps to reach the top, where the door stands. I close my eyes and step over. Then I know.

—-

 

Kivel Carson is a writer, reader, and adventurer with Caribbean and Hoosier roots. She’s a staff writer for an online pop culture magazine, and a budding indie filmmaker. She graduated from Indiana University with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. Her fiction is influenced by the experiences of the African diaspora in the West. She spent time in Ghana exploring the roots of the diaspora and the history and culture of the region. Her mother and much of her mother’s side of the family still live in St. Thomas, USVI.