Amy Gallo Ryan
Water’s Edge
Fifteen fingers worm through mine, burrowing and squirming as they pull hard for leverage. My kids and I are always touching, it seems, but today the physicality has a kind of kinetic fervor. The shrieking, the seizing, delighting in the danger of water chasing us down and sand shifting underfoot.
“Here comes another one!!!!!!!”
The waves are no more than whispers of foam by the time they reach us, my children’s response preposterously outsized, but I understand that their experience of it is real. Their little nervous systems, still so new, have been overloaded, re-programmed en route to being formed. By a mysterious virus that’s stopped the world, the ambulance sirens haunting the empty streets beyond our apartment, the protests where we chant, I can’t breathe, the choppers pummeling the air as we fall asleep.
But here at the water’s edge what’s whipped their bodies into an ecstatic frenzy is something mercifully quaint. They rush toward the waves, willing them on, then double back as the sea answers the call, squealing and screaming in retreat. They frighten us as they thrill us, my two-year-old twins and my four-year-old girl.
We continue like this for a while, until I find my moment. “Mama’s gonna take a dip!” I tell them in a pitch higher than I intend. “I’ll be right back.”
Their dismay, as outsized as the so-recently-felt elation, is immediate. “No!” they cry. “Don’t go!” I produce a reassuring smile. “I’ll be quick,” I say, “it’s so hot, I want to get my head wet.” I try to untangle my fingers, tugging harder than should be necessary as three crumpled faces stare back at me.
Their protests follow me as I make my way into the waves. “Mama, no! Stay here! Come back!” The drop-off is steep, less than a handful of steps until I’m submerged to my waist; babies forced to watch their mama be swallowed whole.
My arms shoot up involuntarily, the chill of early summer saltwater slicing through me, and I turn to wave, steady through their hysteria, while I collect the nerve to fully submerge, craving and dreading it in equal measure. And then, almost by surprise, I’m in, consumed by the planet’s most thunderous silence, plunged into a black hole, infinite tons of water rushing toward me. Those seconds beneath the surface are fleeting, but it’s time enough to register the familiar sensation, a primal truth: This is how it feels to be alive!
I surface, invigorated, hands adjusting my swimsuit, pushing droplets out of my eyes, and turn back toward the shore with a smile. My vibrating children are uncharacteristically still, eyes locked in the distance, awaiting confirmation that I’ve emerged from the reckless, unknowable ocean. As I offer an oversized wave, my husband points to me, waving back. See, Mama’s fine!
The girls smile, placated, but my son is sobbing, wringing his hands, his panic palpable even from here. Come back, come back, come back!
But I don’t swim back. Not yet. Instead, I deny the tidal pull toward my family, just for a minute more. The tips of my shoulders peek out of the water, but my body is submerged, bobbing in the shadows. Out here I am weightless, free, alone. They’ll be ok, I tell myself. They are ok. It’s important, isn’t it? This moment. I’m right here. I’m close. Never close enough, I’ve learned. The ones we love always just beyond our reach.
I slip under the surface one last time. It’s good for them, I tell myself. This is what it means to be alive.
Amy Gallo Ryan is a Brooklyn-based writer and former magazine editor whose work has appeared in Elle, Cosmopolitan, Self and Real Simple, among other publications, and whose personal essays have been published on Motherwell and Literary Mama. Her first book, an infertility memoir-in-essays, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press.
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