Waves

My dad always said that life comes in waves.

He'd grab me by my shoulders, his salt encrusted hands rough against my smooth skin, and turn me towards the ocean.

"You see over there, far in the distance," he'd say, pointing towards the horizon. "It's quiet, but something's building. You can't see It yet, but that still water will become a giant wave."

As the tide crashed against the shore, he'd say: "That's life, hija. Things will seem quiet, then hit you all at once. All you can do is hold onto your board and ride it out."

My dad always saw the world through surfing. It was what he loved to do. He thought that the world around us could always be explained through metaphors, and that the ocean posed endless possibilities.

When he died last year from pancreatic cancer, I found different metaphors.

Like, for example, no matter how much you've fallen, the water will keep crashing down on you, pinning you to the ocean floor. Like how when you're finally about to resurface, to take the breath that you've been yearning for, the tide pushes you down again.

I learned the relentless nature of life from the ocean.

So, I guess that I saw the world in metaphors too.

I used to think that they were pointless. That what you saw in front of you simply was, there was no need to explain it in the abstract. But my father kept insisting that the world around us was so much more beautiful when described as something else, so I grew a knack for metaphors too.

For example, I saw my family, my dad, my mom, and I, as a great coral reef. Beautiful and vibrant, but codependent. If even one thing was disrupted, the entire ecosystem would fall apart. I liked to think of my mom as the water, rushing and free, and my dad as the coral, grounded. I fell somewhere in between.

When my dad died, our own little ecosystem fell apart.

My mom didn't speak for days when my father passed, which I found funny because she was one of the people I knew who could never stop talking. But something inside her broke, and she found her fix in alcohol.

It started as only a little at first, just a few glasses of wine with dinner, then a shot before bed, and before I knew it, she was drunk from sun up to sun down.

I tried to ignore it at first. It was just her way of coping. But then she stopped going to work, and our lights were shut off, and I realized that it wasn't so normal after all.

Whenever she was blacked out drunk and looking to take inflict her pain on someone else, I locked myself in my dad's old shed. It was partly because it was the only place that she never went because it hurt her so much. But, it was also the one place where I could forget.

I could still smell his distinctive scent of seaweed and salt amongst the room. Somehow, when I was in there, everything suddenly felt alright.

He kept all his surfboards in his shed. When my dad wasn't surfing, he was creating boards for when he could. He always said that a moment not spent in the sea was a moment wasted, but after what happened, I couldn't bring myself back out there. It was too painful a reminder of his absence.

But one day, I found something that I didn't find before.

Hidden behind a tarp, was a half-painted surfboard, the hot pink colors leaping off the polished wood. He didn't have to tell me, but I knew that surfboard was meant for me. A thin layer of dust covered the surface, a physical reminder of its disuse. I could practically hear his voice in my head.

"If your board ever dries, then you're not surfing enough."

I wondered what he would think of me now.

As I stared at the board, at my dad's unfinished business, I knew what he would want me to do. It seemed that I moved without my own accord as I hoisted the wood over my shoulders, my feet sinking into the damp sand, and made my way to the water.

On my first wave I fell, barely able to stand for even one second. On my other attempts, I didn't have much better luck. Time and time again, as I tried to ride atop the water, the crashing wave would fling me off my board.

My frustration brought me to the point of tears. I was able to do this so easily a year ago, and now I couldn't even stand without being knocked down again. I felt powerless, out of control. So much had changed over this year, but this, my surfing, used to be always constant in my life.

I didn't just feel like I had let myself down. I felt like I let my dad down too.

I wanted to give up.

I wanted to give up so badly, but I couldn't shake my dad's words out of my head.

"Grab your board and try to ride it out."

As the next wave came, I paddled hard away from it, determined to successfully ride this one. As I pushed myself off my board and onto my feet, something inside me clicked. A feeling that had long been buried inside me resurfaced.

I gained my balance on the board, the rushing water carrying me. The world around me grew silent. I stuck my hand out and brushed the wall of water beside me, creating splashes behind my path. The feeling was one I knew all too well.

As the wave ended and I sat on my board amidst the now calm water, I knew.

This was my dad's last metaphor.

The mist of the water felt like his hand on my shoulder, and the water around me felt like his embrace. He always loved to speak to me through the ocean.

Yes, the ocean is relentless, and yes, the tide crashes against us, trapping us against the ocean floor. But when it feels like there is no escape, when you are on your last breath, it stops.

The waves always stop.

I could imagine him now, sitting me down, the sand beneath us still wet, and saying:

"Those moments may feel far and few between, but they're there, hija. They're there."