(Good enough for my walk on the beach this morning.)
Ben is stacking driftwood. We make sculptures out of it. Lean-tos. Houses. Huts. Swear words. Boxes. He's quoting Baudelair's Windows as he works. It's sort of depressing but poignant. The sea is swirling in this storming, cloud-filled morning. She's dark and angry, disjointed and unsatisfied. I kick her in the teeth as I'm unsatisfied as well. Two pieces of glass and an empty crab shell is all she had to offer me even as I gave her my heart, destroyed as it might be. It's been repaired but it's of higher quality than most. She shouldn't complain so.
And I can't breathe, even as he gets to my favorite part: "In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers."
I sneeze and he interrupts himself to bless me, waiting for me to thank him before he resumes. We sometimes rely on pleasantries and courtesy to bridge the gaps between being able to connect sufficiently, fully-emotionally. We sometimes don't talk when we're alone together, trying to figure out after all these years how to exist on a common plane without constantly taking things from each other. Time, comfort, solace. Flesh.
When he is done ("But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?") he says, that's it then and takes out one of Lochlan's zippo lighters and sets it on fire. I look up to see that he has made a Christmas tree. It's ten feet high and three-dimensional, topped with a nearly-dead starfish we found on the steps. It's beautiful and it's smoking now with the effort of trying to keep a flame pressed to cold, salt-soaked wood. It's meaningful and worth it though we will probably get another ticket for illegal burning on the beach even though this is inaccessible private property and none of anyone's business because nothing is in danger. It's relevant and righteous and bitter and loud, is what it is. Because that's Ben and eventually Ben catches up to all the rumors and the talk and the snippets of life and love and drama and he says enough, she's mine anyway and he shows his teeth and the wolves all retreat back into the shadows of the woods at the edge of the sea.
