A journal of narrative writing.
Maid of the Sea

From the Greek, to return home. Or if not home, exactly, then to the place or time you felt the world as home, your heart hanging rightly inside it like that gull suspended there on ropes of rain. Fifteen years old: the first boy I tried to love but couldn't, the first boy trying to love me, but growing sullen, so agitated in the end by my goodwill that he once clocked me in the throat when I came close. So why now this nostalgia, this returning? Because he lived in a trailer at the harbor, where his father wrapped sailboats in plastic for winter; and because once, in spring, he snuck me below deck of the biggest yacht, to the bedroom walled with mirrors, where we laid together chastely on the rich man's pillows, not talking, he ticking his lighter on and off like Morse code, a far signal. I didn't answer it, then or ever. And when he said at last that we should go, there it was—the look on my face in those mirrors, the wonder at a king bed on a boat, at the money existing in this town to own one, at a boy alive on this earth who knew it would please me to see it. And this is the nostalgia, for that face again for the joy it held: brazen and blazing.

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