bliss

Whenever Mari is pushed and prodded by one of his two friends for his favorite childhood memory, he’s always brought back to the beach. Suddenly he’s thirteen years old again, and the sand is scorching hot under his bare feet.

His mother, before she’d lost her mind, and his father, before he’d left them all in the middle of the night the following year to move with his secretary-turned-secret girlfriend down to Texas, took him to Brooklyn Beach a few weeks after his brother’s death. His sister had been supposed to come too, but she got sick with a bad flu that morning and had to stay home by herself. It had just been Mari and his parents, together for the whole day. The trip to Brooklyn Beach was his mother’s first time out of the house since the funeral, and the car ride there had been nearly silent.

Strangely, Mari doesn’t recall feeling very sad on the way there, though most days back then had been nothing but sad. Maybe he’d just been excited about going to the beach—excited about getting to leave the house at all, really. It was true that he’d never really been close with Brian, who was older than him by nearly a decade and awfully mean—before the leukemia hit, that was.

Even so, Mari preferred to remember that Brian, the mean one. The funny, loud version of him, still full of life. Not the version who was bald and thin and white as a sheet laid out on his hospital bed, the one who’d gripped his hand so tight it hurt and cried for him while apologizing for not being a better brother while Ma sobbed hysterically behind them.

In his youth, Mari often wondered if his family line was cursed, because with every year seemed to come another tragic death. That year had been the death of Brian Welhan, who’d been sick for only a year before the cancer took him. The previous year had taken Grandma, his mother’s mother, who died of a heart attack. Ma had been very close with her mother; she was never quite the same after she died.

Mari had loved his grandmother dearly, too. She had been a kind, funny person—very unlike Ma, who was a serious, no-nonsense kind of woman. Thinking back to that funeral still made him feel sick to his stomach, remembering the dread on everyone’s faces. Like they knew nothing would ever be the same.

The previous year had been his Uncle Ray, his father’s brother, who’d died of a sudden stroke at only forty-nine. Mari hadn’t liked him very much—he’d been gruff, old, and always smelled like beer—but seeing his dad sad made him quite sad too. The year before that, his mother had a miscarriage three months into her pregnancy. Mari was the one who’d had to call 911 for her, since his sister was on a field trip and his father was late coming home from work—probably too busy fucking his secretary-turned-secret girlfriend, Mari came to realize in his later years. It had been one of the scariest days of his life, seeing all that blood on the bathroom floor. Seeing his mother’s limp body lifted, put on a stretcher by a group of strangers, and wheeled straight out of his house.

Needless to say, days back then had felt long and hard and hopeless. The pure dread on his parents’ faces everyday made Mari start to hate looking at them, so he stopped if he could help it.

Mari had needed an escape, and he needed it badly. And he’d never been the type of child to ease into anything; the moment his toes touched the first grains of sand beneath them, he set off running, bolting across the beach as fast as his skinny legs would take him. He heard his father call his name, but he didn’t stop until he was splashing right into the depths of the icy September water, not thinking about how he might look to the others around him, not caring about the way his legs went numb in mere seconds from the cold. Because as chilling as the water was, the sun still sat high in the sky that day, and the sunlight reflected off the waves in a way that made Mari think for a moment that there may just be a heaven like Ma always said there was. Almost indescribably, the sight of that sheen of glittering white light on the sea had set him alight with a warmth deep in his chest and all the way down to his very soul, filling his heart with a bliss he had never felt before or since. Like the rays of sun above both him and the sea were burning him from the inside out.

The extent of the memory he treasured was exactly that—the pure bliss of his body and mind. He remembers the numbness of his arms, his legs, his chest. It was from the cold, surely, but it was also from the thrill of being in that perfect place at the perfect time in the water, floating over the waves as the tips of your toes just barely brush against the ocean floor, and you can feel safe and secure while simultaneously feeling yourself drifting further and further in, the ocean pulling you into its vast embrace. The water bobbed and hissed and rose before him and he rose with it, riding the cold, seaweed-splayed waves like he was maybe Poseidon, or maybe God. Mari was never human in his own mind, not back then. Not even now, really, if he can help it.

But his mind back then had been something else, something special. His imagination traversed the skies and the seas. He’d lived so wholly within his own head for so much of his life, because life itself had nothing very good or kind or interesting to offer him. And that’s what he remembers most—how even if he died right then and there in that moment, with not a thought or a fantasy left in his mind, he would have died happy. He was so young, but he’d been so sure of that fact. How many people got to feel as content in their lives as he had in that very moment? How many people were able to feel at ease like this before they died? Not many at all, Mari knew. Brian certainly hadn’t. Grandma hadn’t, either.

So he’d cleared his mind, and he did not think of Brian. He did not think of anything but how intertwined he felt with the Earth and the world, maybe even the universe, and all of its beauty.

He was lucky. He was blessed. And he was crying, suddenly, and he didn’t know why. Maybe because it was all so overwhelming, or maybe because he didn’t ever want to go home. Right there, in that moment, everything was perfect— a flawless bliss.