starfish

Part I

Once I wrote to you about looking for seashells. I was five, perhaps six, little enough that I left no footprints on the saturated sand of the beach drift.

No swimming for 30 minutes, my mother would tell us. And so, after eating peanut butter and grape jelly soaked Wonder Bread, I looked for seashells.

The abundance of oyster shells belied their scarcity. Many years before, a very many years before, oysters filtered the entire bay in three days, but in the days of Dixie cups filled with lemonade flecked with sand poured from the red and white Coleman thermos now stored in my garage, in those days, it took oysters more than a year.

I carefully bypassed the crushed crab shells oozing gills, but I picked up the tiny broken claw tips. Clam shells still hinged were prized, along with any shell sheathed with the nacre of imagined iridescent pearls.

Once I saw a starfish with six arms in the shallows and crouched to observe. I didn’t touch its autumn cider-colored body partly not only because I knew not to disturb wild creatures, but also because I was afraid it might swallow my finger. I knew it wouldn’t. I knew it couldn’t, just as I knew that its sixth arm grew from overzealous regeneration. And so my hands stayed quiet, and I watched.

Ander! Kicking up sand as he ran, my brother called out his nickname for me. Mom said come back. We can go in now.

Cool, he exclaimed, reaching for the starfish.

Don’t! I was loud enough that our mother looked up sharply. He pivoted and outraced me back.

Part II

I wanted you to have a piece of me that no one else had.

So I wrote to you about the little girl who looked for shells, thought about oysters, and marveled at starfish. I wrote to you about Ander.

I wrote often to you – for you. I wrote my thoughts, my stories, my memories, my hopes, and my fears. Even my fears, my many fears, I crafted and shaped into painstaking prose with a palaverous facade that fooled you every time.

You called my words e-mails.

You didn’t know that if the word could become flesh, then my flesh could become words.

They weren’t e-mails.

They were my words.

They were my pieces.

And even when we were no more, I held on,

not because I still loved you

(and I did love you).

I held on because you had my words.

I held on because you had my pieces.

I held on because I didn’t know what to do

without those pieces.