Three months after my father died, the night I left, a heat wave slithered its way through New York. The thickness of the air that squeezed through the floorboards of my apartment reminded me of the Lowcountry, of home, of the man who raised me. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I was impatient, short-tempered, and impulsive like him. These thoughts rattled inside my head, so I acted and set myself up on a date with a man. I don’t remember his name. I only knew he was older and was oh so proudly into “trans gals”. We met in a classic corner Italian restaurant nestled in the West Village. He had nice curly hair, a broad chest, but absolutely no style. A Vineyard Vines button-up with a mustard stain accompanied his red basketball shorts. He insisted we sit outside. Even in the shade of the brownstones full of influencers, sweat continued to roll off my forehead.
As he rambled, mouth full of pasta, about his dream to be a professional trainer, I realized I had forgotten how many glasses of red wine I’d had. Listening to him through a wine-induced fever on top of the crushing humidity of the heatwave made me anxiously rock back and forth in my seat. I eyed the butter knife in the empty bread basket. Running the knife across my neck felt like a brilliant idea rather than listening to him. I reached out for my wine glass but I knocked it off the table, shattering it on the ground. The other patrons looked over at us with disgust. My date apologized to everyone, then he worriedly looked back to me.
“Bombs away!” I said to everyone.
“What’s the deal?” He said.
“What makes you say that?” I said, slurring my words.
“That’s your fourth glass and you just don’t feel here, presently.”
His words frightened me. I didn’t like it when people thought they knew what I was feeling, what I was going through, where I came from. So I played it casually,
“I just don’t really give a shit about this.”
After my remark, he stared at me so intensely, so bewildered, so disappointed. His familiar, drowsy green eyes locked into mine. They were the same shade as my father’s.
“Then why are you even here?” he said.
A sudden gust of humid air blew past our table, like when my mother and I opened our storage unit and found my white-eyed father lying with his gin bottles. The wine grew painfully warm in my stomach. I felt as if my face began to wrinkle and grow stubble. I could taste of chewing tobacco on my teeth and gin plaguing my breath. I darted my eyes over to the restaurant’s window and saw my father had replaced my reflection. I gasped, pushing myself away from the table and stood up. A sultry stream of liquid ran down my fat thighs. I had pissed my floral slip dress.
After a hurried haze, I hopped the turnstile at 8th Ave, then rode between the L train cars to dry my urine stain. As I was carried through the jet-black tunnel, the blue lights revealing the tears on my acne-ridden cheeks, I knew I needed to leave. I wanted to go home, whatever that meant. My dead Meemaw’s beach house on the coast of South Carolina seemed like a place I could hide for a little while. It was my last option.
I took the Palmetto Amtrak train back to Charleston using a credit card I stole from my mother. I slept most of the time, occasionally being jolted back into consciousness as we stopped at each decaying southern town. When I stepped off the train, pushed back by the thick southern air, I immediately got a call from my mother. I rolled my eyes and decided to answer, given we hadn’t spoken in a month. As I picked up, I was met with the sound of dishes clattering and rapid breathing in the microphone. She always sounded hurried, even if she had nowhere to be. She’d been manic since kicking my father out on the street. I think she blamed herself for his death, which made me feel the slightest sensation of regret for never reaching out. But she would always crawl under my skin in seconds. Frantically stuttering, she asked why she got a notification from the bank. I told her to relax and that she was blowing things out of proportion.
“Careful,” my mother said, “you’re starting to sound like your father.”
Without hesitation, I smashed my phone onto the pavement and approached a taxi.
I stepped out onto the gravel driveway, emerging from the car. Old live oak trees lathered in Spanish moss shaded the shack. As I got closer, I noticed the blue paint had begun to crack and chip. The front porch’s screen, now cratered with holes, let out a haunting whistle as the humid breeze pushed me towards the front door. I spotted a clay turtle on the floor next to the door. I lifted it to find the key.
Dusk was nearly over. Lying on the pull-out couch in the living room, I turned my head to see I was slowly sinking into the thick mattress. In the dark, I felt that same storage unit air slipping through the thin windows. Cicadas outside sang a daunting chorus that became static, and I ended up in a restless and unbearable state. I accepted my fate and went and grabbed a bottle of vodka from my bag.
Janis Joplin’s Ball And Chain blasted while I dimmed the lights. The vodka bottle nearly empty, I danced on the shag carpet. I threw my head around, whipping my hair while the electric guitar let out powerful cries, shaking the room. I smiled as I tilted my head towards the ceiling. My throat burned from the vodka. My knee suddenly met a nightstand, popping out a drawer, revealing tabs of acid I had left on a previous visit. Stuffing them in my mouth, I laughed at my demise. Then I thought if I was going to die, I wanted to go out in style, unlike my father. I tore through a closet in Meemaw’s old room and found an out-of-place oversized brown coat. Putting it on, I felt the outline of a shooter in one of the pockets. I pulled out a bottle of gin, my father’s favorite brand, and I finished it. A package of chewing tobacco was in the other pocket. I stuffed the whole pack in my mouth. The room began to spin, every piece of furniture started breathing, and the record skipped, repeating the phrase, “Dadd,y it ain’t fair, ain’t fair what you do”.
My head moved on its own, and I reached out my arms, grasping for anything, but fell into a mirror, shattering it. I spit out the chewing tobacco all over the shareds. I panicked and attempted to place the shards back together, cutting up my fragile hands. Through the array of fragmented pieces, I saw my father’s reflection again, but this time, he opened his mouth, smiling, showing his rotting teeth and the tobacco wedged between. I didn’t want this, the dark blood running down my pale arms, the room collapsing in on itself. I denied my fate, but had it been too late? I dashed out the side of the beach shack into a collection of withering live oak and palmetto trees.
I ran through the forest with only the moonlight that crept around the trunks and branches to guide me. I felt the pain of sharp palm fronds and pine straws in my feet. Crickets chanted with the midnight cicadas’ whines. I saw a light at the end of the forest and picked up my feet. The faster I ran more branches began to cut my hips and legs. I swore I could hear laughing surrounding me. The light at the end of the forest grew blinding. I yelled out from the pit of my stomach. I tripped, and the sand met my face.
The ringing in my ears became the sound of comforting lapping of waves. I raised my head to see I had fallen onto the beach. The full moon had illuminated the sand in a dirty silver. I crawled over a dune, and the ocean grew louder. I trudged to the shoreline and located the horizon. Heavy clouds threw lightning into the dark sea without a sound. I felt drawn to the storm’s power and fearlessness. My legs moved without me, and before I knew it, somber water was up to my thighs. I could see a promising future clouding my vision. The sea would wash my father out of my system. I would be reborn on some shore far away.
“You dumb, dumb little thing,” a strange and familiar voice called out to me.
I looked behind me to see a loggerhead sea turtle on the shore. I had never seen one so close and so still. I waded back to the beach, bent my legs, and crashed onto the sand. I studied its thick neck, bird-like beak, and its eyes. Its eyes were not black like the ones I’d seen before. Instead, rings of green and amber outlined a large pupil; they were almost human.
“You’ve aged,” the turtle said.
“Do we know each other?” I said, This felt stupider in my head than it did out loud.
It told me about watching me on the shore all my life. Seeing me make drip castles with my father, the boys I brought at midnight, and a journal I threw into the water before I left. Her words took me back to a time that I had tried so desperately to forget. I trusted her. She knew what she was saying.
She said her name was Pearl and that she worried about me. Pearl’s voice sounded like my Meemaw or any old smoker. The grain in her voice relaxed the tension in my body.
“Why do you keep coming back to this shore? Isn’t there a whole world laid out ahead of you?” said Pearl.
Pearl had a point. I had been combating trauma by returning to where it festered the most. The words came crashing down onto my head like lightning, so far away.
“I just want to exist,” I said, tearing up, ” I want my own life. I want to move on. But I think I’ve become my father. I don’t know what I’m doing. I keep waiting to not feel like this, but it won’t come. This is the rest of my life, I just know it. And now I think the best option is to end this rather than see what it will become.”
“You’re growing, sweet child. You don’t need to get rid of the person you were or who you’re becoming. You only need to learn how to control them,” Pearl said, ” You’re stuck in the past and afraid of the future. You wish to move on, well, sweetie, you’re not even moving. How long have you stared out at a horizon like this?”
I gazed across the water again. The storm still teased me.
“How many passing ships have you not even cared to look at? How many dolphins have jumped out of the water without you admiring their beauty? Do you even see the ghost crabs that run right below your feet? If the sun were up, your retina would be burning. You’re inventing your fate by waiting,” said Peal.
As Peal spoke these words, I felt my mouth moving along with her, like she was a ventriloquist dummy and I was her controller. They were words I had been subconsciously searching for. How had the answer been so simple all along? I looked around the beach, wondering why I did this, why I came here like I had woken up from a long drunken slumber. Pearl rested her head on my knee as I felt my father’s soul detach from mine. I saw it float up into the night sky clouds. She smiled and used her little flippers to turn around, kicking up sand, slowly disappearing into the gentle surf. I admired the thunderstorm one last time as it began to push deeper into the sea. My mind felt lighter, and my body relaxed. I stood up, and the world spun to a stop.
As the sky slowly turned light indigo and the dew began to form on the windows, I finished cleaning the mess I had created at the beach shack. I stepped out with my bag and met the first cool breeze of autumn. The humidity had lifted. As the taxi drove over a bridge back to the train station, I watched the marsh shine bright orange with the rising sun. I haven’t returned to the Lowcountry since.