The sandy cliffs are carpeted with ice plants; we descend slowly, the hills crumbling beneath our feet, mist hanging in the air. Louie sniffs at the ground, lagging behind, but as we reach the crest of the final hill he charges down the steep grade onto the thin strip of beach, startling a flock of sandpipers into flight. The high winter tide plays with us; waves sweep across the full expanse of beach and up to the edge of the cliffs. We run together, try to climb the eroding cliffs as the waves rush towards us, water pooling and churning around our feet, soft clay sucking us in. Louie gets ahead of me, and my heart catches for a second as the waves wrap themselves around his body, his head turning towards me as he’s carried back towards the ocean. He struggles free and with a moment of empty beach we run together towards a wider section, the waves chasing us.
Later, after the gym, I sit in my car in the parking garage, biting into a ripe mango, the juice running down my chin and fingers. My body reacts as if I’ve never eaten; I devour the fruit, sucking it down.
The 10:25 showing of The Hours, I sit alone near the back, moving my legs as couples pass my seat. I hunch down as the lights dim, clutching a cup of coffee.
Strange, how I react sometimes. When an author I’ve loved for years, whose books I’ve read and held onto through several moves, when his work begins to reach a wider audience. I wanted Michael Cunningham to win the Pulitzer, but I also wanted to keep him all to myself. And his characters, from all three books, have lived a little in me, or maybe I’ve lived through them. And it is exhilirating to see them lit from within on a giant screen in the dark, inhabited by actors and actresses I love. But I want them to myself. Or rather, I want to protect them. Because only I can understand them; I have that conceit, sometimes, as if I alone have supernatural qualities that enable me to fully comprehend an author’s constructed world. I want to hold his characters close to me, their fragilities safe in my arms. Because I know this: she felt the dark sensation around her, the nowhere feeling, and knew it was going to be a difficult day and I know this: she can feel the nearness of the old devil (what else to call it?), and she knows she will be utterly alone if and when the devil chooses to appear again (funny, even Tennessee Williams called them “the blue devils”) and I know this: “But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another.” (and how could it be that when I first read the book, several years ago, I didn’t understand the title?) and I know this: Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Because yes, even though I’ve had my share of those hours, I still want more, of everything, it’s not something I can give up. And because these women and men, made from combinations of words across a page, because they know the doubt and the soul-numbing fear and the undependable love they feel for each other; because of this I want to protect them, from the crowds and the ignorants and the never-saddened, I want to hold them tight in the dark theater, I don’t want to hear the chatter around me as the lights come up again, I don’t want to walk back to my car in that parking garage and hear around me the debates and the frustrations why did she have to kill herself? because I am conceited that way; I alone understand these women and men, I cannot trust their lives to the people around me.