Rinca: Part 1

Well I looked my demons in the eyes
Lay bare my chest
Said do your best
To destroy me

I've been to hell and back
So many times
I must admit 

                                    You kinda bore me - "Empty", Ray LaMontagne

I have that dream of you again. Just when I think I've finally purged you, finally made it to that promised land where time supposedly heals all wounds, there you are. And today, when the thunder shakes me awake, you follow me back to the world of the waking ensuring that big empty place where my heart used to be rips open so wide I curl my knees up to my chest in defense and groan, "Not today."

"We're stuck," answers Adik, throwing herself back on the bed.

In this palpable pit of loneliness, so excruciating even my skin aches from longing, I've forgotten I'm not actually alone. I jump out of bed and start loading my pack. It’s not too late, I might still send you back to the land of nod, still shake you off, I just have to keep moving. I can outrun you.

But the storm outside is vicious, even our concrete bungalow trembles and the sixty watt bulb in the bathroom flickers on and off uncertainly before going out for good. I finish my shower, dress and pack the last of my stuff by groping in the darkness punctuated by strobing strikes of lightning. But, stepping outside, I curse. I curse the storm and I curse your hovering ghost. It's almost 5:30 but our boat to Rinca's not going anywhere in this weather. I pull up a chair and wait for it to pass; the storm and this misery.

It' s these damn port towns, I think, looking down on the harbour watching the waves tossing the boats below. They remind me of our plans to sail round the world if I ever got well again. You spent hours looking at boats while I scoured National Geographics and atlases scattered like throw rugs on the hardwood floors. One day you said, "I'm going to have to teach you to shoot my gun."

"Why?" I asked, my eyes never leaving the islands of the South Pacific.

"Pirates," you said.

"I don't suppose," I said, looking up now that you had my attention, "We could be good pirates? Like the kind that raid your bar in exchange for cooking you dinner?"

"I mean," you said patiently, in that way you had when you weren't certain, and you were never certain, if I was serious, "protection from pirates."

"Well, I don't imagine we'd need protection from pirates if we were pirates ourselves."

At this your face lit up and you declared, "I'll call you Ann Bonny!"

“If this is another one of your exes, I don’t want to hear about it.”

So you told me the tales of your favourite pirate, the most heartless woman to ever sail the seas and when you were done I said, “Well, I’ll call you Travis.”

“There are no famous pirates named Travis,” you protested, disappointed.

“Not yet, but there will be by the time we wash ashore.”

But our landlocked love sank a thousand ships before I walked away. How could you blame me? How could I blame you for blaming me? How could I possibly have made the right choice between peace and love? This was, it turns out, a swindle, a shell game, I ended up with neither, still sitting here with the ashes of regret, a remorse I never felt after a divorce from a much longer marriage. For a thousandth time I try to shake the thought I’d be better off miserable with you than alone and haunted. More years have passed than the number I knew you and still your memory’s like a cancer. I anesthetize it, I cut away at it, but it just burrows deeper waiting for me to let down my guard in order to consume me again.

Every time I think of you I think of the Fox telling the Little Prince that once you tame something you are responsible for it. I think Exupery had it wrong. It’s the Little Prince who ought to have warned the Fox to be careful who he let tame him.

I tell myself I’ll feel better in Ende but it’s well past dawn and the storm is only now moving on. Even if we leave for Rinca now we’re unlikely to make it back in time for our plane. Which do I want, komodos or coloured lakes? But I am so tired of making impossible decisions, I wake Adik to ask her the time- later than I thought- grab my rain jacket and walk down the hill instead. I’m on my way to the pier to see if Nathan, the Ozzie snake hunter, has made it to shore from his own boat to meet our charter yet when I run into the captain of the boat.

“Only one?” his English forms thick and slurs in his mouth. It takes me a few seconds before I figure out how I know him. “We go. Right now. Mister waiting.”

Cursing, I run back up the hill, grab my pack and shout to Adik that we’re leaving. By the time I reach the boat, with your shadow at my heels, Nathan is fuming.

“Have you been waiting long?” I ask.

“I was here at 5:30, just like I said I would be. Where have you been?”

I know that tone of voice. “For f*ck’s sake Eris,” you’d say, every time I couldn’t find my keys, every time I bought more eggs, which we already had, instead of milk. The problem is, this always made me laugh and then you would start laughing along but I’m fairly certain he hasn’t known me long enough to find my haplessness endearing. I apologize profusely.

“It’s just that I really didn’t think any boat was sailing in that storm,” I say, feeling like I’m stating the obvious.

“I made a promise to be somewhere, so I made sure I was there,” he replies indignantly.

God help me. Last night at the bar the boy was charming and funny and smart and now I find out he’s a mensch too. If there’s any chance you might be rooted out for good, a man like him is my only hope. But, after he regales us with tales of his harrowing trip ashore, I am reminded he’s obsessed with Hat Girl- a tall willowy thing with a nice butt from what I could see when he pointed her out at the bar- and I assure him she likes him and he ought to just kiss her and get it over with.

He protests that he can’t stand her, in that way my students do when they have a crush on someone and they’re not quite sure what to do about it. Somehow, it’s cute when ten year old boys do it, but rather incongruous for someone who just sailed through a quasi hurricane, even if all men are just ten year olds trapped in adult sized bodies.

It’s almost two hours to Rinca and I try to focus on the conversation but you will not leave me be. With the waves rocking the boat like you used to rock me when the pain became unbearable, I feel even closer to you. But now it's not comforting, now it leaves me restless and empty. I want to run.

Someone once told me no one ever thought the earth was flat, at least no one who lived by the sea, because, if you look at the horizon of vast bodies of water, you can see the earth bends. I search the horizon now for the world’s curves, for evidence that she is soft and broad and round. I may have started by running away from something but, on a round planet, won’t I eventually be running towards something?

Nathan says, “Look, dolphins.” Watching them surface and dive, I smile a little and tell him about the dolphins on my escape from Montezuma after the mudslide. He tells me about the tectonic plates, an unceasing geological battle beneath the earth, pushing Australia and parts of Indonesia slowly north. He tells me about Darwin and Wallace, which I already know, but I don’t stop him because I like listening to him. For a while it seems you might just fade away but the desolate landscape that greets us on landing at Rinca is so sympathetic to heartache, it’s all I can do not to weep.