The Surfboard you Left Behind

Story

by Alannah Heffez

“You'll never fall in love like this again,” I tell Evan. Maybe it’s true, and maybe not. It doesn't matter. I've been running for so long that I can only hope to be remembered as The One That Got Away. He curls his toes against the soles of his flip-flops and squints out at the ocean. He's been bare-foot for months; I still am.

“I wish I could stay here with you,” he says.

Our last kiss is salty and sandy like everything else. Like the cowboy coffee we boiled on the campfire and drank straight from the pot, filtering the grinds through our teeth. Our entire world was a crescent of black-sand beach and we were sticky from found mangoes. We slurped the juice from their fleshy pits and crossed again and again the fine line between mangoes and kisses; we lost track of days and counted instead the freckles multiplying on each other's skin. We tangled on the incandescent beach under redundant stars and got sand in all of our intimate places.

Before Evan came I was alone.

I lay naked on the beach as the tide went out and pulled the sand from under my body, burying me inch by inch in its retreat. In those days I stayed in the shallows. Every time I lost my footing in the waves I panicked, imagining all that would be required to match my drowned body to the photo ID, to bring my orphaned passport to the Canadian embassy, to dig out the in-case-of-emergency phone number and decipher international calling codes. It seemed way too much to expect of the Mexican authorities without a couple of bribes to push the paperwork through, and there was nobody I'd emailed in a while who would notice I was gone.

Evan arrived the same way I did: scrambling over the barnacle-studded rocks that bordered the little village of Santa Angel, weary of the bottom bunks and top bunks and hammocks in the hostels where everybody asked “Where are you going? Where have you been?” Hung-over from drinking Corona by the litre and dancing in a crowd of déjà vu strangers.

He came with his surfboard tucked under his arm, sat on his heels in the sand, and watched the waves curl away from the point. Their sudsy white crests rolled clear across the cove before finally spilling over and slamming into the shallows.

Evan's shadow fell across my belly like a cool touch and I opened my eyes.

“Do you mind if I stay?” he asked.

I shrugged and he did.

With nobody watching, it was so easy to fall in love.

He taught me to surf, or we paddled out together and re-enacted cheesy scenes from Titanic. I massaged the growing muscles on the backs of his arms and the upside-down V between his shoulder blades. I abandoned my tent, and we slept out on the beach, dizzy with shooting stars.

“All those wasted wishes,” I whispered in awe.

What could we have wished for? Time didn't even cross my mind. “My watch is dead,” Evan said one morning.

I laughed. “What day is it?” he asked, as if it mattered.

“Sun-day. Sunny day. Surfing day, of course. Maybe a sandcastle kind of day.”

He got up and stretched and then pawed though the tent for his shorts.
“Where're you going all dressed up?” I teased.

“I gotta go into town.”

He picked up the plastic water jug and rummaged in his pack for some pesos.

I clambered up the rocks when the tide was out and watched the shiny tropical fish dart around in tidal pools looking like miniature prom dresses. Later, when the sun started to sink, Evan stood on the beach and framed my silhouette in the rectangle between his thumb and forefingers. I'd run out of film for my camera in some long-ago town and hadn’t looked back; photos had always been for some other day.

He waved me down and I came running, with my hair all salt-water tangled, whipping in the wind behind me, and threw myself into his arms without even a trace of irony. We'd outlived every romantic cliché, worn them down to their truthy nubs: yeah, there's something irresistible about sunsets. On the other hand, sex-on-the-beach is likely to give you a little more friction than you bargained for.

“It's April,” Evan told me.

Back home, it was probably snowing. Everyone would be shocked and appalled, would have already donned their shorts and miniskirts and been up to the Tam Tams on Mount Royal on the first sunny Sunday, convinced that spring was here to stay. They would already have committed to the Montrealers’ mass delusion that winter no longer existed. The unseasonable blizzard would make front-page news as though it didn't snow in April every year.

I looked at Evan skeptically: this was no April.

“God, I totally lost track of time,” he went on. “All these days blurring together...”

“Just as well,” I told him. “Time was such a bitch anyways.”

I was pleased, for some reason, with this passage of time. I’d lingered in every town from New Orleans to San Cristobal like a kid pushing curfew: each day away felt like a tiny act of defiance.

“This has been amazing,” Evan said, “But, Annika, I have to fly out of Mexico City in a week.”

His words weren't sinking in. They required an understanding of time and space that I'd learned to live without.

“Why don't you just stay?”

He laughed. “I wish. But no, I can't. I'm starting Uni in Melbourne. I have to see my family.”

He stopped abruptly and walked into the ocean. Nothing he could say was going to make sense–he knew that much by now, at least.

There was a strange new rhythm to our love-making. We tried harder to fill each moment, hoping it could somehow overflow into the empty future. As though we could wean ourselves from each other through excess. As though we hadn't been addicted to excess from the start.

I prodded his kisses for a new urgency or for melancholy resignation. Strange to find myself wondering about Evan. Stranger still to find myself stranded in my own body peering out at him uncertainly after all the months that I'd inhabited the space between us.

Maybe I left first, a tide slipping out in the night, stealing the ground from beneath us.

The last morning is too late anyway, so I cast my farewell like a spell: You’ll never fall in love like this again. He will forget me and my last words or I will haunt him 'till the end of his days. In this left-and-leaving world, maybe the people who haunt you are the only ones that ever matter.

“I love you, Annika,” Evan replies, but he doesn't release his plane ticket to the wind, doesn't let it flutter off to sea. So maybe love is something else.

The break is perfect: four-foot waves rolling up to the beach in tidy sets. These words belong to you, Evan, these thoughts. Before you got here, waves looked to me like the neat peaks of children's drawings. You taught me to seek the tipping point between the surge and the rushing surface that pushes in to shore.

I am still talking to you when I should be talking to myself. I'm too accustomed to bouncing thoughts off of you, finding my bearings in your replies. The word echolocation comes to mind. Part of me is still trying to grasp you, like a phantom limb, in the empty space a few steps behind me where you used to stand, with your board tucked under your arm, dragging your toes in the sand.

But now there are only footprints and the surfboard you left behind.

So I paddle out. The landmarks go blurry through my tears and I end up paddling into the current, but I can't give up the aching rhythm, won't relieve my burning lungs until finally I tip the board over the break. Exhausted, I float belly-down and bawl until I'm out of reasons.

Sunlight bursts through my wet lashes, casting rainbows. I raise my head and look around. The wave surges, blocking my view of land, and I panic for a second; my heart rises in my chest, my eyes search hopelessly at the shades of water and sky. But then I feel the familiar tug towards the crest and the slide back into the depths. I know exactly where this wave breaks and I can orient myself by the gentle rise and fall. Even here, with no land in sight, I'm truly not lost.

And so I breathe deep, and feel solid. I am holding all my pieces now. Whatever mementos Evan keeps of me belong to him now, so I let 'em go. It would be easy to sink here. I've got no anchors, no loose ends, I've got nothing. Just this solid body, self-contained and self-containing, tiny between the ocean and the sky. It will be alright, I think: a few moments' struggle and then nothingness doesn’t sound so bad.

All the while, the waves rock me and then suddenly, just an arm's length away, there is a leap! A slick dark creature breaks the surface and its fins become wings for a weightless moment: a manta ray cartwheels through the air and then splashes back into the sea.

I just want to tell everyone. Evan will be jealous. I want to write that email home I've been neglecting for so long.

There's a big wave building up behind me and I start to paddle. Deep strokes pull the board up to speed, merging with the rushing water, until the nose rises above the crest. Then I push down on the board with my arms, tipping myself onto the downward slope. A moment of senseless, blinding speed. The board quivers, catches an edge, and when I feel it solid beneath me, I leap to my feet and carve right, into the green.

I don't search for Evan's bobbing figure in the water, cheering me on. I look straight into the translucent wave and see the tiny fish back-lit by the sinking sun. The wave closes out and I ride the foam into shore, surveying our beach from afar. My beach now, but not for long. I won't be staying, I'll be moving on.

Or maybe it's time to head home.