Do you always get your words just right? I don't. Even when I want very much that my words
should come out just right, sometimes they don't. Here's an example.
Maine is a good place for love; a Maine island, especially.
I was twenty-nine. My divorce was final. On that summer day, Channa and I were sailing the Maine coast with another couple. We had chartered a forty-foot, full-keel, clipper-bowed, gaff ketch. The long-range weather report was favorable, and we anticipated a week or so of gunkholing and of short passage-making east of Penobscot Bay.
In late morning of our initial day out, we anchored between Round and McGlathery Islands, neither one inhabited, seaward from Stonington. While our friends remained aboard, Channa and I rowed ashore to Round. I explored the coastline in one direction, and Channa wandered off toward the southern, the seaward end of the island. A short time later, I came upon her. She was sitting on the granite slab of the shore, just above the surf, completely still, staring out to sea, seemingly humbled, in the way that Moses might have been humbled when, at last, he was shown the Promised Land.
Since our meeting nine months previously, Channa and I had been growing toward love, while I worked to disentangle myself from my marriage. Channa takes words seriously. Though my marriage had been a mere legal formality during the past two years, it was still, as she pointed out, a marriage, and therefore it was a bond which she had no intention to break. So, until the bond was formally put aside by the State, we had held ourselves at the maybe stage of our love (albeit at an anticipating and at a hopeful stage of maybe).
There, on Round Island, we made it almost all the way to yes!
At first, I watched Channa’s absorption, and then I sat beside her on her rock. She acknowledged my presence by the touch of her shoulder against mine, but by no other act…by no turn of her face toward me, no speech, no motion, no smile. She remained intent with her gaze toward the sea. As I remember it, the air was warm, the breeze mild and on-shore. No sound intruded, other than the sounds of surf and gulls.
Channa allowed her silence to continue. This was an intimate gift of great allurement for me. Her silence allowed me to preoccupy myself, too, for I am a silent person, content with my own thoughts. My inclination to silence was honored, just then, by hers.
Our rapt consciousness continued for as much as an entire hour…and during a change of the tide.
We were both, during that timeless time, subsumed entirely within the presence of that for which we both yearned.
Was it the sea, this thing for which we both yearned? No. Was it the harmony of the celestial spheres? Was it some philosophical aesthetic? No. Was it God? Maybe we found God there, too, but He—with due respect—wasn’t the point just then. Was it our lambent awareness of one another—side by side, fulfilled just by the touch of our two shoulders, without speech, our two souls at last complete?
That’s what it was.
Then I did something I do not advise an ardent young swain to do after such a time of bliss beside his love. As Channa’s body language began to show that she had returned from heaven and was ready to talk, I turned to this beautiful woman and, with my most soulful eyes, I indicated my love of her by breathing, “Being with you is like being alone.”
Yikes!
It was not until much later that evening, and after very much harried explanation by me, that we managed, at long last, to get the thing all straightened out. What I had meant, of course, is that being with Channa was as good as being alone. As good as. This is what I had meant, of course. Repeat after me, young ardent swain: being with your love at a time of absolute silent heavenly bliss is as good as being alone. Remember that.
Ever afterwards, during our subsequent thirty-seven years of marriage, “Round Island” has been a code phrase for us, now that my catastrophe of suggesting that Channa wasn’t even there had been washed away. Round Island means absolute heavenly bliss...together.
Post a comment and tell us whether you have ever gotten yours words all tangled up into error. It's funny how that happens, is it not?
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