Safe Haven - Part 1 - The Shipwreck Loop

 Jus was running. His past was in hot pursuit, but he had just broken away. It was ironic because he made it. He had broken free three years earlier and was living on a strange planet where nothing was measured in the same way.

I will never understand why Jus came back. He was supposed to be passing through on his way into the past that he never had but always wanted. It was a powerful lure. It was one that he would turn everything over in his life.

What he did not see coming was the adult tendency to focus on survival, which works in the path of least resistance. That worked for a while until it did not. Jus realized he was being poured into the mold he never wanted to be shaped by. 

One morning, with rage in his heart, he ran for the border. The guns behind him were firing in disbelief. "How dare he choose something else?" But he did it, with all of the beautiful disasters that he was always famous for, and succeeded anyway.

His last foothold on that life suddenly crumbled, and he was completely untethered. Jus could not, for his life, imagine what tomorrow would be like, just like it was on the other planet. But this was not that. His lack of connection dropped him in the sand of a beach where it seemed like anything was possible, and he wondered what could really be possible.

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Many miles away in a dangerous sea, weathering, weakening, and unpainted, there was a ship and a girl named Maarja on it. She kept throwing punches to see reactions. She did not know why, but she needed it. There was something there. The ship had wrecked due to the neglect and affliction she and the other crew had dealt it. The energy they received weakened the ship's structure, and there was nothing anyone could do.

Maarja jumped from rotted board to rotted board of debris floating in the sea until she found an inflatable lifeboat with barely alive people. Carefully, she slid them off the raft into the depths. As the sun set, storms from the mountains to the west of the sea drove the little raft far away.

The light of day found the raft sitting on the shore of a beach. For days, Maarja watched and received people from the ship, but somehow, they disappeared because they were useless. They always paddled away, floating on whatever they could find because they knew it was a better fate than staying.

Weeks passed when she saw a boy named Jus fall from the sky, but he was safe on a platform. He landed on the beach with support from those who sent him there. He continued with that connection for a while, and Maarja watched. She asked questions at times, and he answered them. He asked her questions, and she answered them.

They sat apart from each other, looking at the sea for days and days until Jus's support disappeared. In the sand, he was drunk on the prospect of freedom. Maarja watched. A wayward passenger from another ship woke on the beach one day, and she collected him. It looked like he would stay, and suddenly, Maarja rejected him.

Jus sat on the beach with the entire universe open. Possibilities of things he had never done or known lay out before him. Anything was possible. There was, however, a danger to not knowing things, and it turned out that he knew much less than he was aware of.

Jus realized as he stared off into the sea that he did not need to stay here. That is when the meteor fell to Earth and vaporized the sea. That is when Jus did what he always would do. 

Look away down Gower avenue

For some, I was on the other side, an adversary. For those who loved me, a spectacle. No matter what, it was bad. Resigned to this failure, this me, the alien who I lived with but did not understand.  Even the self-deception. Absolutely ridiculous. 

There is low and then there is low. To live and die in disaster every day and console myself by dipping potato chips in teriyaki sauce. Alone.  There is no difference in the people around me from anything else as far as I can see. There is anger in them, in the air, the sun, and the trees. Running is no longer possible. If I don't believe it, just watch what happens when I try it.

I am angry too at the ones who can live my way and still stand at the common and be found acceptable. How do they do it?  How dare they? In my heart, I play out the day they too have to cash in, just as I am being forced to.  It will take 31 years for them to come to me to say, we should have listened. Instead of this bringing me peace it made me thankful they did not listen. Those bitter ironies inside of me can also be sweet.

Despite repeated warnings, I flee.  Running like never before, changing everything.  Maybe changing something. Anything? Anything at all? I push hard for the surface of the syrup like water and blast into the air where there is sun and blue sky and those moments are fantastic. Coming down from the arc I dive even deeper into the dark thickness.  New depths over and over that overshadow my climb into the air and light.  Less light, more darkness. Where is this going?

An old man passes by and throws me a line and I grab it. I rise determinedly from the depths into the living.  Dry ground, the first I have seen in a long time.  What I did not know, is that this is part of the healing as well as what happens next. Soft and friendly voices reassured me that I was safe and that my path was not as treacherous as I thought it was.   As I step across the welcoming threshold and turn, the heavy door of ancient steel bars slams hard to let me know, that I have betrayed myself and it is over.

I have written over a dozen times about who saved me from myself one night in September.  It was a man who could save me, but not himself.  For this, I am forever grateful and forever sad. What I had done until now was not living, it was dancing at the zombie zoo.  Taking hope from nowhere, I saw a way back to the land of the living.  I knew for sure this time, it could really be. I walked the piers late at night looking at the reflection of the lights in the water somehow believing that a vessel smashed into 100 pieces can become one piece again.

September 9, 1989, was the last time I ever drank alcohol.  If I had not stopped, I would not be here to tell you about it.  Here, now, 34 years later I still see it as just as dangerous and just as much of a risk.  Even in my worst moments, there was a glimmer of hope within me. That was me, looking away down Gower Avenue.