Coming Home

The first thing I ever felt so compelled to fail writing pages and pages about was early summer in Chesapeake Beach: the sun rising purple above the Citgo and the air clear enough that you could stick your hand clean through it. May and June have a certain smell, and September.

In Chesapeake Beach, children fish over the sewage drains. The sun cooks the children and the fish cook themselves, scorching on the cement. Everyone goes barefoot and the bottoms of their feet blister and burn. 

My father swears he doesn’t trust the fish caught here, though he grilled them faithfully for nine years. Since I began college, my father has embraced veganism. 

As August hits its peak, a pastor convinces us all that these are the days the earth will eat us alive. 

In Chesapeake Beach, teenagers pick fruit from backyard trees and bushes and let the juices run warm down their arms, seeping into gardeners' scrapes, sweetening the metallic taste of blood. Everyone is always ripped open here–it must be something in the air.

In Chesapeake Beach, we are proverbially taught not to enter the water with an open wound, and while I’m past the days of bicycle chains digging into my thighs, I still hesitate before letting my feet slap against the wet sand on my way in, as if the sludge will strip away layers of my being and leave my soul lit up by the sun like a spotlight. 

I wanted to learn to write about my hometown like Joan Didion wrote about Sacramento. The first R-rated movie I ever watched was Lady Bird, with the volume off and a chair pressed against my locked bedroom door. I contemplated what she must have written in her college entrance essay to garner the reaction that she did–the nun saying “you must really love Sacramento” and Lady Bird earnestly denying it. I figured to love a place, you had to want to leave it. 

For a while when friends visited, the first place I’d take them was the next town over.

In Chesapeake Beach, everything is close to everything else. The ends of the docks kiss the water–you put your feet in and your knees are blessed as accomplices. I said I would never fall in love with any man from my hometown, not after I’d seen them all swimming; I moved an hour away and kissed a man the first week. As he dripped with sweat holding me after, I realized that I’d never love a man in my college town either. Now I visit the beach and watch the tails of long dresses lap up women’s ankles and the waves into soup. I try to consider motherhood, holding something so sturdy in place, but don’t know where to begin. 

When I was little, I’d run into the bay with gashed knees. I called the open-wound rule “bullshit” and my mother would threaten to wash my mouth out with soap if my legs didn’t fall off first.

In Chesapeake Beach, I learned to hold my tongue. 

In Chesapeake Beach, people discard what has stopped serving them at street signs, in roundabouts and cul de sacs, but never the dump. Never the dump. Instead, couches sit and wither, coffee tables hold rain, then leaves, then ice, then collapse. Children rearrange living rooms at the ends of their blocks and try on domesticity like trench coats. They run barefoot all seasons, putting themselves into families and growing out of the act by spring. In summer, they write plays and perform them in the Boys and Girls Club gym. They write like they have never seen anything real, like they’ve never been granted permission or denied it, like they have opened the door to the world for the first time and are chopping what they see into kona ice and putting every syrup on top.

The first lesbian I ever slept with kissed me as though I was something to be swallowed. They swore if they leaned on my chest in just the right way, they could hear the ocean. I went home for Thanksgiving break and watched my father pray loudly in the bagged salad aisle of the corner store for two men who passed us, holding hands. I figured if I were to go anywhere, I’d want to go home.

In Chesapeake Beach, every man owns a gun. My father keeps his in the safe in the basement. Our house number is the code. My neighbors do the same, and theirs, and theirs.

In Chesapeake Beach, you do not get shot, but you learn to behave.

In Chesapeake Beach, your house is not your home. Your home is rarely safe. It is the water that whispers for you to run back to it, even when it’s freezing, even when you’ll burn, and you will love it enough to learn how to listen. As a child, I methodically never put on enough sunscreen. I knew that to burn would be to tan, and I’d wear my skin like a trophy for the rest of the summer and through fall, until it faded into a fresh start by new year’s.

In Chesapeake Beach, the water glints until you make eye contact. I keep time with the waves, knowing not to let more than six seconds pass without bobbing my head up to look out for a current. Now I count too, but differently: mapping out trips with my family strategically when they visit, avoiding streets and Junes, covering certain stickers on the fridge. I give just enough updates so nobody has reason to suspect there may be more. 

When I pilgrimage back, the question has never been if I have a boyfriend, but rather why I don’t. I laugh and shrug and joke. It’s never funny and everyone laughs anyway.

In Chesapeake Beach, you learn how things are done and you do them, or you burn tomato-red no matter how far you try to run.

One night close to Christmas break, my partner and I rose from my tiny dorm bed, tangled and tripping on each other’s legs. They touched me and said “you’re wet,” like I didn’t know already. Like I could ever be from anywhere else. I packed my bag the next day, washed my underwear in the dorm bathroom sink, and broke up with them a month later when we got back to school. The ground froze over, inviting me to slip. I watched forgotten school books pile up on tables outside until they drowned. 

Here, late winter, the sun sets purple over back campus.

Towards the end of high school, my friend wrote a perfect essay about living in Chesapeake Beach and I remember my favorite lines: “Our house has a tin roof. When the rain drums against it, I feel most at home. At the beach right down the hill, I feel most at home.” This summer I moved into an apartment with a tin roof and that same friend moved two blocks away because history repeats itself. I’m not sure how I feel about it all. In the past two years as we drifted, we’d settled into a routine of twice-a-year dinners, the two biggest holidays: summer’s end and Christmas. Something about it felt homey. I’ve learned to love spending most of my time alone.

No matter where I go, I will have no other choice.

No matter where I go, I will always be from Chesapeake Beach. 

When rain pours here, I turn off the AC so I may hear it. I lay in bed and try to take iphone pictures out the window of–what exactly? I’m not sure. When thunder and lightning boom, I run out to look at it, a soaking proclamation of my grown-up griefs and fears stripping themselves bare. I consider the inevitable truth: I will fall in love again, I will go home again, and both of those adventures will be manless and solitary. Across the bay, they closed the library and the elementary school just to rebuild them in the nicer town next door. The playground where I used to go to read was bulldozed for crime. Look, Arizona is $1.79 and the bagboys are getting laid off; look, the crabs are harder to catch and the fishermen have babies who will turn into fishermen who will have babies like little mirrors themselves. But look, the sky here is still purple, the earth is still wet. I must let myself get in the water.