no vacancies

the hermit tarot card, a death that keeps dying, and prayer

This post includes multiple mentions of death, drowning, and feelings of lack of identity. Proceed with caution.

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My first memory is of the beach. I think I was laying on my back, looking at the sky— what little I could see of it, through the mist coming off the water— and halfway in the water, just letting the already-broken waves slither under my tiny body over and over again. It would go up my legs and hips, past the neck of my wetsuit, and shift the sand through my scalp. I remember it felt like fingers. I remember wishing it would drag me away, thinking that drowning would turn me into a mermaid.

I was seven years old.

How many times has my heart stopped by now— five? Six? None of it was intentional. I’ve never tried to die, death just seems to stick to me like molasses.

(The first time: stillborn, choked to death in the womb. Took one minute and forty-eight seconds to resuscitate me. My skin was blue, my eyes were red. My grandmother thought I was a demon, briefly.

The second time: my sibling slammed my head in the sliding door of our family van. I was unconscious and didn’t respond for two minutes. I don’t know if I actually died, but my parents thought I was. They were trying to figure out how to tell my sibling that I wouldn’t be waking up when I opened my eyes. I was four, I think.

The third: drowned. Got stuck in a sea cave. They pumped the water out of my body in under five minutes, but I don’t think my voice has ever recovered from the salt. I was six.

Fourth time. Laid down with sea sickness in a boat and didn’t get up until it was docked. The man working the boat crossed himself and prayed when he saw me sit up. I remember looking at my body, even though my parents swear up and down that I had my eyes closed. I could see the entire boat. I was eleven.

Fifth. Drowned, again. My surfboard knocked me unconcious when a wave hit me the wrong way. They found me face down. Just over three minutes to resusciate. I was fourteen.)

You die, over and over. What does that say about where you belong? Where’s your home?

I’m told that it’s the Lyme disease that killed my memory. The truth is that my memory is near perfect, as long as it doesn’t involve the house I grew up in, my parents, or myself. If you ask me to recount some episode of a TV show, I can tell you all the plot points, who was in it, costuming choices. I remember my childhood when I left my hometown. I remember all of the strangers.

Even when my mother is standing directly in front of me, I can’t remember her face. Everything about her is dust, my father too. My sibling less so, but every memory I reach for is covered in fog like seaglass.

What I remember: meeting the frontman of a band who had just gotten their songs in a surf documentary. He was tall, strong without defined muscles, suntanned and had ocean-bleached blond hair. He surfed. We all surfed. It was right after my third time dying. He asked me if I was trying to kill myself, and when I said no, he was genuinely glad.

“You’re too young for that. You haven’t even seen a rated-R movie,” he said.

He taught me how to ponass fish, and then when we played the documentary on the side of a bedsheet-covered van, the band played along. I don’t remember his name— I don’t think I ever learned it— but I remember his voice, singing the song.

Lost, he wailed over and over again.

What I remember: the poledancer everyone called Bubbles. She was in her late twenties and drove all over the states to compete nationally. She was incredible— heavy tattoos, surfed, eyes like black pools that shone in her face.

What I remember: the people of Van Life, their faces, their talents. The aboriginal guy who shaped boards, handed me a Skil 100 planer, and let me try to shape my own shortboard— it ended up a little (read: very, almost unsurfable) lopsided, but with the shape of the waves that day it cut into the trench alright, even though it was wobbly as hell. The two Hawaiian women who would bring their guitars out and play long into the night, soothing the babies and little kids to sleep. Aussies, four or five of them, tall and lanky, who would go out laughing and come in whooping with enough fish to feed the entire campsite. The only Brit, who would pass me a pair of boxing gloves and spar with me, who taught me how to draw the connections between what’s around you and what’s in you. The couple, in their 80s, who still went out every day and went to sleep in the back of their van together.

What I remember: The brine of the ocean. The sound of a river, a fire. The smell of gasoline, hot asphalt, pines in the summer, the rosebush parts of my grandpa is buried under, the spice cabinet, smoke. The texture of gravel underfoot, of surf wax. The taste of that powder-fine dust you always find up in the penninsula, olive oil, my father’s empañadas, the sound of the van engine, how it rumbles through your whole body. The west coast that I traveled up and down as a kid. I can tell you about goldenrod and the different types of evergreens and I can tell when it’ll rain in the next 20 minutes from smell alone, but I couldn’t draw the layout of the kitchen of the house I’ve spent my entire life living in unless I’m inside of it.

The other day, my mother showed me a photo from almost a decade ago and, pointing at myself, I asked who that was. I shouldn’t be better at applying surf wax than recognizing my own face.

I’ve heard a few people with chronic diseases talk about it— being far away. Looking down at it all from above. When your body or something in it is hostile to you, trying to kill you, there’s this forced diconnect between the self and the body. You don’t want to be there, so you try to distance yourself from it. I have that disconnect in some shape and form, but slightly to the left.

It’s the disconnect you get while riding a wave, and everything disappears. It sounds cheesy, but I’m completely serious. When you finally drop in, everything just shuts off. You’re working purely through some instict, some higher power guiding you. It’s the emotional equivalent of a glass of water in the sun— clear, warm, serene, everything coming into focus and fading away all at once. You, very simply, are just existing when you catch a wave right. You’re covered in salt, your eyes are burning, you’re soaking wet and shivering, sand is stuck in your wetsuit and rubbing your wrists raw, but you don’t notice. The board and you and the ocean all merge together to fufill a singular desire: movement.

I get it when I dance. It’s the same trance that my sibling has when they draw, apparently. It all seems to snap together. Time moves around you and without you. That line from Nazim Hikmet’s poem Things I Didn’t Know I Loved: “The world flows past on both sides distant and mute/I was never so close to anyone in my life.” It’s that— the closeness, the away-ness.

Out of touch, but in tune. Whatever I can’t see, I can feel. Flying blind. I’m not trying to distance myself from the pain anymore because I focus in on it, the way my body reacts to movement, and I dig into it. Pain, inherently, is a neutral event. Even though my pain is seemingly never-ending and probably will last the rest of my life, if you treat it like it’s something that’s happening now— no anticipating the pain, no holding onto it— it’s better. It’s just as painful, but it hurts less.

You die, over and over, you’re in pain, your memories are half-gone, but you remember that feeling of the wave. You hold onto it. The click. You live in the click. You learn to sit right between the curl and and the break.

It’s balance.

Sometimes, people don’t get the balance. My best friend was dumbfounded when she realized I wasn’t joking when I said I was living the dream, despite being in pain constantly. This, I’ve found, is because people want you to want more. In a world that profits off of your every desire, not wanting anything more is all you have to protect youself. You have to go beyond it. You have to click into the world.

I am six again. The frontman is next to me. His hands are wrinkled from salt and sun, years and years without sunscreen, quick as they chop off the head and tail of the salmon, removing the spine with a flick of the wrist. He stops— an intentional stop, blatant in it’s deliberateness— and looks at the sky. It’s dark out, the campfire a few yards away the only source of light. It turns the underside of his jaw and nose amber.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

“Being thankful. It’s good to be thankful,” he says.

“Like praying?”

“Kinda,” he says. I wait. I’ve always been good at waiting. “I don’t really know if I believe in a god. But I believe in the world, and I believe in this salmon, and I believe in souls. So I’m grateful for the salmon, and I’m grateful for the world that’s given me the salmon.”

“That’s praying,” I say with the certainty only a child can have. “You don’t need to be talking to God to be praying. I pray to my stuffies all the time and I pray to my mom and when I’m in the kitchen I pray to my favorite chair.”

“So you pray to the things you love?” he asks, pushing sticks through the salmon’s flesh.

“Yeah, but I also pray to everything else because I don’t love my mom’s job because she’s on her computer all the time but I pray to it because it’s good and it makes money,” I say.

He’s quiet. “Alright,” he says. “Praying. Yeah, let’s call it praying.”

“Awesome,” I say, because I’m six and talking is a novelty to me.

A beat.

“Do you think that praying… how do you pray? Like, can you pray in a way that’s not closing your eyes and being quiet?” he asks.

“Totally, dude. I think you’re praying to the salmon by, like, eating it.”

“So do you think that just being alive and doing things is a prayer?”

I think, then: “Yeah.”

I am seventeen again, in my room with the curtains closed, absent-mindedly sewing pieces of fabric together for something to do. Repetitive motion, consistent. The sa ta na ma chant, Ave Maria, Om Mani Padme Hum, rosary patterns— the 5.5-ish second repetitive breathing that makes people happier. Exhale. Stitch, stitch, stitch. Existence as prayer.

Of course. The click— existence as prayer. Right. I, somewhere deep in me, know that there’s no way to expound on that thought any more than I already have, and when I try to, the words slip through my fingers like they’re covered in oil.

I can make words, I think, so I go downstairs. I make marinara sauce with my great grandmother’s recipe (a prayer to her, a prayer to the food, a prayer to the pan, a prayer to myself who I’m feeding) and eat it at the table (a prayer to the wood, a prayer to the bowl, a prayer to the chair).

In Chinese tea ceremonies, they use pots and cups made of unglazed clay. Over time, the oils from the tea leaves gets absorbed, which seasons and strengthens the clay. This is a prayer to the pot. When you use things that are designed to be used, that’s a prayer.

In other words: the marinara is delicious, and I can sit on a chair and eat on a table, and that’s fucking incredible.

In other words: what a delight it is to live in a world that’ll love you right back, if you love it.

In other words: home is here, because you are.