Waiting for Us, Part 2

When the wind blows the right way, a call gets through. A cousin, my cousin, gets new marrow from Germany, so we celebrate with salsa as cancerless cells pump through that girl's body. A small child, my child, is anesthetized by mask and snapped back into place. She wakes up casted pinkie to mid-arm with glow-in-the-dark medical papier mache and her hovering mother and daddy, bed-side and offering ice cream. There's enough spare pillows for her elbow to take one and the house waits and holds us all.

The house leaks everywhere like always, not so much from pipes but from its own marrow: walls weep water, floors drench from underneath, ceramic tiles sweat like the forehead of a fat man. We anesthetize ourselves from it with sun and bacon and beach chairs and the contents of an almost-always full cooler. We burn and eat burgers salted with sand and take blurry pictures of mostly teeth and throat which, it turns out, is the way laughter looks on film.

Still: children will whine and weep despite fruit snacks. Married people will hurt each other in the gracious company of other married people who understand. So when the cooler empties, we fill it. When shit happens, we bury it. When the waves come, we slide a plastic sleeve over her cast and watch her sheepishly creep in, then watch her jump off bridges. When the storm comes, we take turns watching the surf disintegrate a barrier beach, which is our beach, the place where we share our second growing up. We don't cry; shoulder to damp shoulder, we marvel at the force of the thing. Like a buoy that doesn't belong to us, we send our regret to sea and let the toughness of the place take over. 

Storms of all kinds blow in, shift landscapes before eyes and then pass. Broken hands heal. Marriages rise and fall and rise again like waves.

We have waited for this week for a year, for this reclamation of who we wish to always be: mirror-less, unbelted, divine. We waited and waited and waited for this one week and like always, this house? 

It waited for us.