A Fin Breaching

In that particular half-sleep that only settles in transit, eager smiles flicker in and out of my dreaming. Groggily, I remove each earbud, craning my neck towards the herd of jackets rushing from one side of the ferry to the other.

Exiting the cabin, the March sunset tints the scene pink lemonade and sliced grapefruit. Each gust on deck takes special interest in targeting my watering eyes, freeze-drying them as I map a path through the bodies and cameras. Nearing the rail, I clear a blur of tears with my sleeve: A hundred meters from the hull are rhythmic slices of ocean— whitecaps, splitting in a trio.

Dolphins.

A roll of glitter-blue butting the edge of the sky.

Green-fisted inlets leaning into the periphery.

Kids, spinning figure eights.

Couples wrapped in the halos of each other's exhales.

Mirror signals bouncing off silver snack wrappers.

And dolphins, porpoising.

Natural. Easy. Antithetical to the way I was living, three years since shattering.

Like a hole in a bucket, my finances had trickled over the Pandemic. The person I thought I’d marry no longer felt the same. And drinking, already an issue, had become a full-fledged problem. Sweating through a week-old T-shirt, I piled cardboard boxes into my teenage bedroom while my mother berated me with “I told you so’s”.

I imagined myself as a spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere—chunks tearing off, flames devouring a swerving smoke alphabet—wondering if anything would be left to land. At the same time, I understood that my situation wasn’t terrible. I knew plenty of people who had survived worse, so how pathetic was I, bleeding out from a paper cut? ¹

But time passed, like it does.

Each shard eroded until the hurt seemed natural, like pieces of landscape that had always been.

Habituation can so easily be mistaken for healing.

Eighteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “There is a place in the soul where you’ve never been wounded,” ² but this is an elusive destination, especially if one identifies as a lost cause. You can’t get better if you think you deserve pain because an ease in suffering would conflict with justice.

It’s not that I wasn’t trying.

Out of debt, two years sober, and in the best shape I’d ever been, I was doing all the things the culture said would fix me, yet all I experienced was clawing. None of it changed the facts: I was someone people left.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that a stunted future can be preferable to an unknown tomorrow?

Reality is incomprehensible, its vastness made bearable by narrative. We nail language through all we see, attempting to stabilize the random, to find things where we left them.

In anguish, I wonder, have you too secretly wished for harder blows? Have you taken absurdity as a challenge to prove your toughness—a sense of pride in the iron filling your mouth as you spit teeth to the ground, as if welcoming punishment somehow anoints loss with meaning?

The fear of the dark never dissipates, and despair begets despair.

Also true: getting lost is a prerequisite for being found. ³

* * *

At a friend's invitation, I picked up a bottle and drove north.

White sunlight stenciled loose geometry upon a gravel road, the tires’ crunch gradually overtaken by a splatter of laughter, bass, and possibility—we should remind ourselves more often that anything can actually be anything. ⁴

Shouts skipped across the lake; heat dragged above. The sway of the dock made everyone a dancer. Shots punched holes through a purpling sky.

And then it was over.

Arrhythmic snoring. Murmurs. The symphonic slumber of the plastered.

Through a tile-spin haze, a damp pressure stretched the elastic of my waistband.

I remember puberty: the crinkling wax paper of a doctor’s bench; a cold, hair-knuckled hand inspecting, yanking the air from my stomach.

It was something like that.

The next morning, hungover and fighting to not drift off the freeway, I rubbed my eyes towards a roadside McDonald’s. The lot shimmered with speckled glass. Families paraded out of sedans like clown cars.

I hadn’t said a thing. Didn’t make a sound. Told myself it was a dream. Heard the demon whisper, “This is the only way you can be touched. Disgusting.”

A poisoned thought—I was nothing—millions of times through my existence. And all the ways I’d tried to prove it. ⁵

If you can’t trust yourself, it is difficult to hope.

* * *

Despite a new workplace, body, and friends, I remained adrift, doomscrolling in a bathtub with tears camouflaged by steam. Call it angels, subconsciousness, or the universe—the fact remains that a sliver of clarity sometimes cuts through, like a hallway light crawling beneath the door. Catching my exhaustion in the phone's black screen, I saw that violence isn’t just explosions. Death can be a slow-motion, everyday procession, and I’d been leaving for a while now. ⁶

Something needed to change.

With Toronto in thaw, a bevy of coincidences converged: a close friend moved to the Vancouver mountains, a woman I’d spoken to on and off for a year lived there, and a fellow wanderer asked if I’d join for a Damien Jurado concert (who sings “All is not lost, even if you're without a direction/ Go west, go west!”). ⁸ I knotted each disparate thread into a sign, stuffed some clothes in a bag, and booked a flight.

I’m sure the novelty wears off, but it still disorients me to start the day in one place and end it in another. It’s as if there’s a double back home, keeping routine while a duplicate breathes new air, like the faster we move, the more splintered variants of us there are, roaming.

Descending through fog above peaks blanketed white, then sliding glass opening to traffic and grey.

Strolling the market, squinting at cargo ships, catching gulls snatching pizza from tables.

Sushi with friends before huffing up a trail.

Ocean, returning to kiss the bluffs.

Moss, raising empires, stone after stone.

Trees, hunkered firmly, one with the ground.

My friend of a decade, teenage lane-changing through a Mario Kart tunnel to Duc and Kish’s, who are in that kind of love that makes you think, “it isn’t all bad.”

Me, in a wash of tungsten, brushing a woman’s hair back with a joke.

Do you remember what kissing can be? When you’re really there? When nothing is wanting and nowhere else exists?

Holy shit. So much I’d forgotten.

Leaning on a rail, palms numbed by metal, blinking as dolphins pirouetted, I thought of the endless beauty that can never be possessed. The second our vision shifts, it vanishes. But of course, it remains—independent and sovereign—always there, if we choose to see.

In the sharpness of the wind, each dive receded.

* * *

The PA crackled, “Fasten your seatbelts”.

We thudded onto the runway, the plane lurching to the right.

Gasps. Yelps.

Then just as quickly: Yawns. Stretching. Back to business.

Except for me.

In that 5-second fear was something I hadn’t felt in a long time; I didn’t want to go just yet. And while it was no grand redemption, for me, in that moment, it was enough.

Dear reader, I’m telling you this because it’s true: anything can actually be anything.

Just keep your eyes open long enough.

Notes and sources for this essay are available here.