Stones

by Laurie White

September 24, 2009

I’m sitting in the bookstore trying to grab ahold of the
words before they leave me. The game club of Maryland is gathered
here, and the bookish men and women at the table next to me are
playing a card name whose name I can’t remember, even though I
recognize it on sight. I once sat across the table from someone and
learned to play it myself, wondering why I was there when it made no
sense to be, beyond the fact that I have a tendency to put myself in
risky places when I stubbornly and often stupidly feel it’s worth it.

Names dance across my screen – words and facts and possibilities that
I’m trying to file alphabetically under what makes sense, whittling
them down into a decision that lets me sleep at night, even if I have
to sell my car or walk strange city streets alone and mostly unafraid
to do it. Sometimes I don’t think I can, that I’ll just let the waves
of the next thing wash over me until I’m that half mile down the beach
that you float before you even realize it, when all of a sudden the
familiar umbrella and your people are specks down the shore, waving
you back if you choose to pay attention.

When Virginia Woolf walked into the water of the River Ourse and
didn’t emerge, the stones weighing down her pockets, I can’t imagine
that no one saw, but maybe that’s just because someone has usually
been watching me – not known to be a strong swimmer. Still, I’ve never
been truly afraid of the ocean, and can spend more time than you’d
believe floating on my back, finding the mellow spot past the breakers
where it’s warm, going up and over the tiny waves, chasing the sun on
the tops of my legs and my chest and my face.Bell_virginia_woolf_

On that same odd trip to the beach when a truly very sweet man and I
played that card game, I took a photograph of an exceptional sunset.
When I finally made it to the sand the next day, I was alone. It was
cold out, walking into the water out of the question, except dipping
my toes in to say I touched the ocean, a personal ritual regardless of
the season or temperature. I sat on the sand with a notebook on that
cold March day, and there was no one around for a good distance. It
occurred to me that at that moment, temperature aside, I could walk
into the water and just not stop, nothing on the other side but China
- a concept we’d been taught as children digging holes for sand
castles. We ignored the barrier of Europe and Africa beyond the
Atlantic, even the idea of the Far East as ephemeral as air then.

I remember writing this idea of immersion down that day, feeling
guilty for even thinking about it, knowing I’d never do it, knowing as
sure as I sat there that later that day I’d be getting in a car and
heading home, gazing out the window and wishing things different, but
far away from this idea and the ocean itself. Still when I thought it,
I wondered if, miles or just yards away as it happened that people who
cared about me were, would they feel it? Was there an imperceptible
shift in the air around the people close to them when people did
things like walk into rivers not intending to emerge? Especially when
they succeeded? There had to be, I thought – at least a palpitation or
a whisper of an itch. But maybe not.

Woolf wrote to her husband in her suicide note, “You have been
entirely patient with me and incredibly good,” one of the most
heartbreaking things I’ve ever read. “You have given me the greatest
possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could
be.” They didn’t find her for 21 days, after which he buried her under
a tree in their garden, a last act of being in every way all that
anyone could be.

It is a gift to be that way for people, and it’s not easy at all. I
see it in the people I love, who take care of each other. I see it as
they try to figure out what the deal is here for themselves. And I
know firsthand that it’s hard and often impossible to be entirely
patient, and beyond that to be incredibly good, and to still be
honest, and to keep your sanity all at once.

I’m not sure how I went tonight from watching tables full of people
having a perfectly good time playing a variety of card games whose
names I can’t remember to thinking about Virginia Woolf walking into
the water, or myself sitting by it, for that matter, with the wind
kicked up so hard that I couldn’t hold the pages down to write what
was in my troubled heart. That day was years ago and most things
related to it I’ve tried mostly to forget in the ongoing reinvention
of my 30s, in my determination not to let the too-important past be my
entire prologue, and maybe to even surprise myself with a renewed
capacity for joy. Details – that sunset, my shoes, the bay in the wind
from a second-floor balcony – have come back as I’ve sat here escaping
the things that are important now, today. My rivers, and increasingly
the ocean they spill into, are figurative. I’m signed on for the
duration here, and although there aren’t enough storm metaphors in
existence to fully express how that’s gone, or might yet go, the rocks
are on the shoreline, long since removed from my pockets. There’s no
room for them in there, with all the spare change and lipstick.

I wish that someone had run into Virginia on her way to the river,
like so many someones have run into me, and a glance or a word had
pierced her resolve to emancipate her husband from a situation he’d
have dealt with gladly, most likely, into her old age. I wonder what
something would have brought her out of the darkness. Her story has
always nagged at me, is one of the pieces of evidence that sometimes
things don’t work out, seems a waste. The thought of purposefully
drowning scares me sitting here – going under, losing breath,
weighted.

The people sit around me and play cards, moving pieces methodically
around on boards, deep in thought, talking excessively about trading
imaginary gold and building kingdoms. Greek gods are somehow involved
at one table as well. One man’s voice has a pitch so low it dominates
the room, an incessant droning of rules and strategy. I’m going back
to the word arranging, to researching the facts, trying to make them
mesh with my intuition and my common sense, to discard the idea of
stopping the droning man and having him ask his shamans and mages in
khakis and oxford shirts to check their runes and make a best guess
about this actual human life.

Laurie White
writes here.