do you know your ocean?
After 4 years, At The Bottom Of Everything has a fresh look thanks to the incredible brand identity work of Natasha Whyte-Gray (@nasquash). Working with Natasha was a beautiful collaboration and she has brought a visual language to At The Bottom of Everything that I feel so perfectly represented by.
Kurtis and I had similar handwriting. Sometimes and still when I write in particularly large letters, I see the echo of his hand, the way he would write my name in tall, thin letters. I haven’t seen a card with my name written by him in years now. When he wrote, he loosely held Japanese pens he specifically-selected between his thin, nimble fingers. His nails were always clean and pale pink. I used to come home and a card with his writing on it would be propped up on a pillow or a vase or the couch.
You can fall into absence without warning.
One thousand, four hundred and twenty-four days after he dies, you can realize you aren’t going to receive a card from him ever again. You can feel your knees give out. You can collapse to the carpet beneath your desk and lose an hour to sorrow. You can stand up again and still be falling.
*
I wake in the morning and outside the kitchen window I see small bones scattered across the dark blue-gray paving stones of the backyard. Sinew, white and fleshy, stretches across the stones like pale worms. What creature has been torn apart? Magpies rip more sinew off the bones. I am awake because I heard the birds screaming. Four, then five, of the dark creatures, their wings like puddles of oil, flutter into the yard.
*
I am so tired I haven’t been running. I try to walk outside in a heat that is so intense it has its own breath. There is the air, hot against my skin and then, somehow the regular exhale of the heat’s lungs, an even hotter press on my mouth, my throat. I pass by gangly geese, their parents hissing at me and I watch two dark, thick masses chew the long grass in the middle of the river.
Beavers, I realize. I saw one, dark and heavy, trundling alongside the running path at dusk last year and understood for the first time how large they are.
The river is churning and high—grown by summer storms so intense and frequent this summer the sun, if it’s here, feels like forgiveness. When I see a thin brown and white snake curled to the side of the path, I startle so loudly and suddenly that I scare not only the snake but also three other people. Later, I see another snake slipped beneath the wire grate covering a retaining wall. It seems impossible that a snake could fit in the invisible space between wire and stone. Its body bulges around the wire but when J looks, the snake is alive.
Basking, J tells me.
*
My mother tells me about Thailand’s seafood slaves—men trapped into a life at sea, lured by lies, held by brutal violence. Almost all captives never see land again.
I open a new tab on my phone as we speak.
No one uses Google anymore, that’s what my friend told me a month ago. This is news to me because I still use it. When I asked, apparently “everyone” is asking ChatGPT instead.
Google returns an answer, a digital dog with a horrifying bone in its mouth: a former enslaved fisherman recalls being lashed by barbed stingray tails, recalls the terror of eternal ocean and sky.
*
I need to have my desk facing a window to write. A huge spider, larger than a silver quarter, drifts by on the iridescent line of its own making. The light radiates the spider’s body so it glows soft yellow. It is ugly but it is weaving something so delicate, so remarkable. The window is extremely clean from the summer storms. I touch it lightly, to make sure it’s still between me and the spider. Yesterday, rain lashed the pavement with such brutal intensity that it felt like rage—I opened the front door and let the relentless fall fill me with an expanding sense of calm.
*
Online, a questionnaire for me to complete:
Q. Do you consider yourself into mindfullness?
A. No.
Q. Would you say you’re more in your body or in your mind?
A. Mind
Q. Do you know your ocean?
A. Chicken bones.
The truth of it strikes me as I watch the cursor blink. J deboned thighs the night before and dropped them in the white trash bag which sat out all night in the backyard. The birds must have smelled the remains. It is odd to think of birds smelling anything with their hard, sharp beaks. As if fingernails could be noses. As if noses can only be flesh.
I don’t know my ocean. I don’t even know what this question means. I live near a powerful river filled with dark beavers and flat, gray stones—fish that sometimes grow ill with a spinning disease, trapping them into turning eternal circles.
I open a new tab on my laptop. Another digital dog, another digital bone—OCEAN represents 5 personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
I thought the question meant—Do you know what holds you but also threatens you? Do you know what you love but also fear? Do you know the name of the knife edge on which you live?
*
Ransack the freezer and check the labels and origin of all your fish and seafood. Sit on the floor. Pile of frozen flesh beside you grows a white fur of frost.
The cost of everything. You can still be falling. We know a knife is a weapon and a tool. But how often do we really think about it?
You can stand up again and still be falling. ❤️💔
More beautiful writing. I still have no idea what ‘do you know your ocean’ means. But ‘what do you love yet also fear’ I probably understand. I love, love but fear how vulnerable it makes us. Yet we embark down the path of love knowing that either through betrayal or loss we will ultimately grieve… and still we keep on doing it.