The Boy On The Bay (The Beginning Of A New Story!)

 The Boy On The Bay

The late spring hung in the air like mildew in Louisiana, gripping hard on the dust and sweat clinging to the air to keep it from subsiding. The trees danced vivid green circles around the blue background. The greens were bright but natural, unlike the sails of the boats on the harbor. He thought about the woods and how he could see himself as a tree, standing tall amongst the onlookers, swaying softly in the wind as the seasons changed. Time would standstill. He would finally understand the beauty of nature and see the harmony everyone around him always gushed about. Adam tried hard to see harmony in the wind and the seas, but every time he tried, he would just work himself into a frenzy, mad that the harmony didn't seem to extend to his mother. She was swallowed up by the great big world fast and straight, and spit out slow and twisted. She deserved better than the world gave her. She was the only one who cared for him all his life, making dinner out of roadkill and scavenging berries out of Mrs.Jackson’s garden. How can there be harmony in a world full of death, decay, and war thought Adam as he looked out to the bay. The sun was all but set and yet their Adam was, still waiting for the last drop of sunlight to stream through the water, forming the streaks of gold and pink he had witnessed once. But another day went by, and another, and there were still no drops of sunlight like he’d seen once before. Maybe it was like his mother, one moment of harmony, one ounce of kindness is always accompanied by years of great hunger and debilitating starvation. Adam headed back down the cliff after waiting for the darkness to turn. He would do this every night for 10 years, but he would never see that sight again. His harmony had run out, and now he runs on empty, praying one day he will get his fuel to live again. 

His mother's laugh echoed in their small cabin entrenched in the bayside forest. They were alone and happy, twiddling their thumbs before they knew they would have to move away again. See, Adam’s mother had crippling anxiety, and every time she got a job, she would be fired soon after. She tried hard to make it work for Adam, hiding her sobs with the shower water and smoothing her heavily wrinkled forehead when he walked in the room, replacing them with a smile that she thought reached her eyes. When Adam turned 16, he got a job in town so his mom wouldn't have to, but then they started asking too many questions and he knew they would have to move again. Eventually, they just stopped going into town, scavenging for everything and finding homes, or cabins, that were remote and uninhabited for long periods. They got good; really good at running and hiding, but the harmony would eventually reproach, leaving them bare and exposed. While they had lived in the bay area his whole life, they had moved houses more times than he could count. In the bay, the summer made it easy to blend in with tourists and the winter meant people went back to their mansions, leaving their “summer” homes bare and unguarded for people like Adam and his mother. Adam knew only of the bay, and that was fine with him. He thought the world was “a train mess on a railroad going straight to hell”, which is what his mother used to tell him all the time when he was younger. She would keep him alone all day, leaving him to fend for himself. He knew how to care for himself at the ripe age of 4. He could cook and clean like any old housewife. Of course, he had to use a chain to stir his food and reach the high shelves of the pantry, but he was perfectly capable of doing things all on his own. One thing Adam had loved his whole life was reading. He would read the contents of every book he could find in the houses they stayed at which occupied him throughout the long, lonely days. He would read cookbooks, classic novels, and even the children's stories, which he personally favorited. He liked happy endings and fairytales, but he also knew they weren't real and that they never would be. His mother, on the other hand, hated fairy tales. She read a few books, but she told him her favorite was A Portrait Of Dorian Gray because that story highlighted the poisonous minds of men. She taught Adam to see life through her eyes and to do the jobs and chores of women in the past to prove a point. But Adam didn't mind what his mom made him or didn't make him do because at least she was there, next to him. For a while, he thought he would never see her again, but she could never leave him for long. Sometimes, when her mind got really bad and rage freckled the edges of her vision, she would leave Adam. It would only be for a short while, a few days maybe, but when she came back she would be peaceful and calm like Adam knew her to be. He was okay with her going away if it meant she came back better. 

Although Adam was never schooled properly, he was smarter than most. He was reading novels the size of boulders by the time he was 6 and learned all his lessons through stories. While Adam never told his mom, he knew she was unwell. He knew she should be on medication, like the characters he had read about in his books, but they didn't have the funds to get her what she needed. He decided to let her go off and do what she needed, so long as she came back normal. The thing about Adam was that he knew his mother, but he also knew there was a side to her that he would never know, and he had to accept that. And Adam did, with open arms. He knew it was better to have someone than no one and that being alone with his thoughts could cause him more self-destruction. So Adam sat and waited, idol as the ground gave way to leaves and the warm summer air plumped up to the giving of fall. This fall would mark Adam's 20th birthday and moms 50th. Her hair grew a deep gray as the darks of her eyes faded to honey. Her skin was more bendable than it used to be and it hung loosely under her baggy clothing. Adam wondered how it felt to age physically and grow old; how it felt for his skin to turn rotten and his eyes to lighten to honey as his mothers had. But he knew it would be a while until his age turned physical and his mind grew foggy, so he let the air seep into his lungs deeply; completely. One day his lungs would never fill with air. One day he would be nothing but ash and dust littering the soil like all those before him. Adam knew how his life would end and that he would die when his mother did, but he still felt the pain of knowing, the pain of longing for a life different than what was presented.

 When he looked out at the bay, he thought of his life if he were a girl. He wondered how long it would have taken him to muster up the strength to stir the pot. He wondered if life would have been kinder to him and if his mother would have ceased her spiral into madness. His eyes grew watery as he blinked tears into the sea nipping at his long, boney feet. He wandered aimlessly along the stretch of beach which everyone in town avoided. They called it Hell’s Gate because of the great number of sharks that lived on the reef not far. No one could fish here because everything would just get gobbled down by the big ocean beasts and parents feared their children would get eaten. Adam never really cared much about what other people thought or didn't think. He thought the beach was beautiful and that the sharks had the right to eat the fish. Why should the fisherman be angry with the sharks when all they were doing was surviving. The sharks, he thought, were a lot like his mom, overprotective and vengeful. He thought about all the poachers and how people killed sharks for sport, and he understood why the sharks were how they were. Adam looked at the world, and he knew everything. There wasn't a thing he couldn't comprehend; couldn't understand, and that scared him. He was fearful that his life would be exactly how he thought it would, but Adam did not. What Adam didn't know was the girl, Lydia, who lived in the lighthouse with her wealthy family. He had no clue how often she watched him, wondering why he was on Hell’s Gate, and why she had never seen him around town. She thought about his soft, dark curls and the way they stopped right at the end of his eyebrows. But Lydia liked to look from afar, never getting close enough to hear; to touch. She, like Adam, believed she knew too much about the world. She believed that getting close to someone meant you would have another person to fear losing; another person to disappoint when the waters turned to white caps and it got too hard to swim. 

Lydia was the daughter of the town lighthouse keeper and his wife. They were wealthy enough, giving Lydia all of the things a young girl ought to have in life. But Lydia didn't want a loveless marriage and kids in a white picket fence. She didn't want the constraints of the small bay town and the small baytown men. She wanted nothing more than to be a bird, so she could fly free above the men below, feeling the wind carry her to new lands that people would never have the privilege of seeing. However, Lydia knew how her life would go. She knew she would marry a wealthy man who drinks too much whisky at the Bay City Bar and comes home at night with hot hands. She knew she would have kid upon kid until she couldn't have anymore. She knew she would love the children because they were part of her, but she would also secretly hate them because they were also part of him. Her life would be noiseless and plain, like any other woman and she would be a speck of dust among the willow trees soon enough.