I sink into the floorboards where I find a whale, his eye a knot in the wood. He seems so tired, this wooden whale, whose body has been absorbed into the floor. I fear my body is becoming stuck like his, my limbs melting into the wood. It seems this will all harden at some point and I’ll be stuck like a fly in candle wax. I turn to the whale’s weary eye, ask him how to stop sinking- he’s silent. I should have assumed as much, his mouth has disappeared below the boards. As I sink, I remember that my father floated. In 1968, he was a boy studying philosophy and searching for purpose. He was lost, questioning the hollowness and grief of the human experience. One night, alone in his bed, he tried to speak to god. He came to this conversation earnestly, and with an offering. My father asked for proof, undoubtable proof of god’s existence. He promised that if he received this proof he would dedicate his life to becoming a priest. This pledge was made with every ounce of sincerity he contained as he stared intently at the ceiling. Immediately after this promise, nothing happened. He lay in the silence with discouraged melancholy, letting his mind wander back to the hollow. As his brain wandered, his body began to float. Inch by inch, foot by foot, his body moved up towards the ceiling. He was stricken with fear- immense, all-encompassing terror as he was raised without any control. He begged for it to stop, that he believed, that he didn’t need anymore proof. At 5 feet up, he fell back down. A different man hit the bed. There are moments that mark a before and after, this was a moment. A grounded man, not previously found talking to things that couldn’t be seen, he’d now been shown something. Why him? What now? He wasn’t sure, so like all of us, he eventually wandered back to the hollow, and fell asleep. My father did not become a priest, and when recounting this story to his children he marked it a profound regret. He felt he had broken his promise, that he had let god down. He did become a lawyer, a professor, a father, a husband. Though he died younger than he wanted to, he got the chance to grow a cleanly groomed Santa beard. He got to fall in love in his 50s with a woman who saw him as an angel. ‘If you want to be a grasshopper, you need to marry an ant’ he told me. He got to live as that grasshopper, lazy with time to drink dry white wine on patios with a feather in his structured ivory hat. To wander into empty churches on a weekday afternoon and think existentially. To know his adult son in a way he didn’t when he was a child. To monogram the cuffs of his pastel button ups. To learn the lives of waiters from the restaurant he lived above. I’m not sure how well he really knew me then, though somehow, I feel he knows me now. Knows my intentions with my life. Knows my spectrum. Knows that past the coldness is an almost naive core. At his funeral, I arrived early, sat at the front of the church with greasy green hair and hideous lip liner clutching a furry lion backpack filled with broken cigarettes. When it was over, I turned around to leave, and saw that every single inch of bench under the cathedral ceiling was filled with people. Strangers I didn’t know, who he had meant something to, unbeknownst to me. This man who met god, has now become god to me. Not sure what praying really is but I speak to him when the tangible world feels cold. So I ask him now, from within these floorboards, beside the whale’s eye- how do I move again? How can I float? Luckily, I hear him.
‘When desolate, empty, and inspiration barren- remember the apricot you’ll eat next August. Juice running down your chin. Remember lying on your back getting grass stains on your bloomers, pissing the day away. Remember wiping crumbs of good bread and butter from the corners of your mouth and smirking from the delight. Remember that beyond the outer layers of fear and control, at your core, there is a cord. This cord cannot be eradicated, cannot be shrunk. This cord is a knowing, a quiet understanding that you can trust yourself. That you are held. To be human is to free fall into a void. The more you connect with that cord the more your lips curl up as the wind whips past your cheeks down the rabbit hole. The less you need to scratch the walls trying to find a root to cling to. Learn to love with every particle, then need with every inch, and finally let it all go when the time comes. To stop sinking, you can accept that you are falling.’
Thank you Fred, for giving me a moment of my own. I suppose I want to taste that apricot. I want to sit in silence with the sun as it falls, waiting for the first star. I want to watch the wind move branches and wonder where wind even comes from. I want to watch children walk home from school carefully balancing on winter ice. I want to swim too close to a seal in the ocean and get scared. I want to love even though I know it all ends. I want to be open to the feeling of everything. I want, and because I want, I try. Goodbye, sweet whale. May you find a moment too.
