Mother Ocean

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• April 19, 2015

I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock again.  I wasn’t always this way.  I used to not have to set an alarm.  I used to wake up automatically at six in the morning, and I’d get out of bed to start my day.  Back then, I couldn’t even understand why anyone used the snooze button, and now I’m one of those people… Desperate for another seven minutes of sleep.

The alarm wakes me, and it’s cloudy and cold for April.  I’m awake, but I have no desire to leave my bed.  I’m convinced this is the most comfortable I’ve ever been and I don’t want to ruin it.  Actually, I’m convinced this is the most comfortable anyone has ever been in the entire world, ever.  Why should I leave this?  Why should I spoil the moment of being the most comfortable person who ever lived? It would be a crime against humanity and the universe to leave this bed.  Seriously, buy a tempurpedic mattress.  It will change your whole life.  Unless you own a tempurpedic mattress, you have no idea what a great night’s sleep really feels like.

I remember why I have to get up.  Work.  Money.  Money to pay the rent.  Money to eat.  Money to survive.  I need the money to keep my dream alive.  But my sleeping dreams have been fucking with me for weeks now.  Lately, my dreams in my sleep have exhausted me, waking me up several times in the night.  I wake up going from one reality to another.  Typical stress dreams. They don’t really make any sense.  It’s just a stressful situation, followed by another.  I wake up from it.  Then, I go back to sleep to try to resolve this stressful dream, but the alarm disturbs me from achieving any resolutions.  Every morning it’s the same thing.  What’s the point?  Why do this?  Is any of this worth it?  I’m a prick in the morning.  Once I’m up, I’m fine, but it’s a daily struggle.  Once a morning person, now fully a creature of the night.  A moon worshiper.

The gears in my head are jamming up.  They are running too fast, then breaking down.  I don’t know why.  And I don’t know how to fix it.  I just do what I always do.  Wait.  I hate waiting.  I hate waiting on a line.  I hate waiting for my career to advance.  I hate waiting for the gears in my head to function properly.  But it’s the only thing I can do.

I’ve almost drowned on more than one occasion.  I don’t think I ever met a surfer who hasn’t been within 60 seconds away from drowning.  If you’ve ever been held under the water for more than a minute, you know, 60 seconds is an eternity.  Your body is thrown around, a sock in a washing machine, while you tell yourself to stay calm, because that’s all you can do.  You have to wait.  You have to wait to get to the surface for air.  And when you finally get to the surface, you have to take a quick breath, because a wave crashes on top of you, and once again, you’re waiting for your next moment to breach the surface.  This goes on.  Every time, you have less energy to fight.  You have less oxygen in your lungs.  You can’t hold on as long as you did before.  The wait is both shorter and longer.  It’s fucking terrifying.

I was once “saved” by a life guard when I wasn’t drowning.  I was 15.  Me, my brother, and a couple friends were playing a game in the ocean.  We were good swimmers, and didn’t fear the ocean.  The life guards started blowing their whistles and ran into the ocean with floatation devices.  My group of hooligans looked around to see who was drowning.  We saw no one.  Maybe they went under?  We kept looking.  If someone needed help near us, we could help until the lifeguards swam out.  The lifeguards were headed straight towards us, and it took us longer to realize than it should have that we were the ones being rescued.  Sure, there was a current that day, but we’d been in worse.  The lifeguards reached us, and had us hold on to their equipment and swam us back into shore.  I let go and started swimming, and the lifeguard told me to hang on.  I was insulted.  I’m not a fucking kook, I thought.  We get to the shore, and the lifeguards ask us if we’re alright.

“Uh… yeah,” and then I turned around and jumped right back in the ocean and swam away.  My parents and their friends watched the whole thing.  For a split second, they were worried, and then they saw the annoyed looks on our faces and knew the lifeguards had overreacted.  We’ve been swimming since before we could even walk.  My mom’s friend asked the lifeguard how old he thought I was.  The life guard said, “ten?”  She told him I was fifteen.  I was only four years younger than he was.

There have been a couple instances while surfing during big waves and strong currents where I was shaken up and close to drowning.  But the one time I legitimately thought I was going to die, I wasn’t surfing.  It was a hurricane swell.  I was at Robert Moses beach.  The lifeguards had the red flags up and forbade anyone from going into the ocean.  The waves were big, but I like big waves.  So I decided to go in just outside of the flags.  At first it was fun, diving under big waves, one after the next.  But I had my fun and wanted to go back in.  But I couldn’t.  I was getting dragged down the beach by the current, and the undertow kept pulling me under.  I was getting beaten down by waves.  One after the other.  Held under water.  This is the only time in my life I tried calling for the lifeguards, for anyone, to see me.  Over and over.  Screaming. Swallowing large gulps of sea water.  No one could see me.  My screams were lost in the sound of the crashing waves.  My tiny body, kept disappearing under the white water.  I could see a beach full of people, and I knew no one would save me.  Once this was clear, I knew I needed to get a wave to take me in.  This would mean being held under for a while, and I was already exhausted.  It was the only way.  I had to wait for the right moment.  I had to time it perfectly.  I knew I was in real trouble.  This wasn’t a game.  Losing meant dying.

Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes.  You don’t think about your loved ones.  All you can think is that you don’t want to die.  You don’t want to die.  I don’t want to die.
Even though this has happened to me more than once, it’s not any less scary when it happens a second or third time.  Don’t underestimate Mother Ocean.  She can make you her bitch.  She can remind you how small and insignificant your life is.  She can take it, if she wants.  And it would be easy.

Many people would be dismayed by such an experience.  Understandable.  I know plenty of people who’ve never been close to drowning and the thought prevents them from going in the ocean.  Truth is, Mother Ocean has saved my life more than she’s tried to take it.  How many times have I almost snapped, and then find myself on a beach, perfectly calm, just hours later?  More than I could count.

I have preached heavily about the healing powers of the ocean, both mentally and physically.  Which is why I know, very soon, she’ll save me once again from the dark recesses of my own mind.

It genuinely peeves me how much the weather can sway my mood.  It’s fucking annoying when something you have absolutely no control has power over you.  This Spring has offered little respite from the long cruel Winter.  For weeks, my mental state has been slipping, and for no goddamn reason that I can tell.  I’m foggy.  Drinks don’t help.  Company does me no good.  Even my writing suffers.

I go for a run on Shore Blvd in Astoria, on the East River.  A cargo ship passes and I watch it’s wake make it’s way to the rocks.  A swell.  The face of a wave.  It’s small, and it won’t break, but something inside me rises.  I remember.  The warmer weather is coming.  The temperature of the ocean is rising, slowly.  Soon, Mother Ocean will deliver, as she always has, and I’ll go from living life in black and white to life in technicolor, once again.  I just have to wait.

There’s no feeling more euphoric than teasing death.  No orgasm, no killer set in a theater, no amount of money, no drug, nothing gives you a high like narrowly escaping your demise.  When you’re on the shore, coughing because your lungs have water in them, and breathing deep hurts, for a moment the world is in slow motion.  You’ve never been happier to be here, on land, alive.  All your senses heighten.  The smell of the salt water.  The color of the sky has never been a more a more perfect blue.  The sounds of waves which have just released you from their boundless power.  The feeling of the sand is like you can feel every individual grain touching your skin, like trillions of universes at your fingertips.  The taste of Mother Ocean lingers in your mouth.   The sun is drying your skin, and you can feel all the individual hairs on your body rise, like a plant which turns to face the sun.   Every synapse in your brain is sending electrical blasts to your nerves.  The heart is racing.  Adrenaline, the human’s super power, has saved you.  You can feel the blood rushing through your body, like an ocean.