Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love
Photograph by Natalie Silver
By Natalie Silver
One
It was before the plagues struck and you learned how to love like a local—three days before you were poached like a marlin in the Pacific, seven before you learned how to hitchhike, nine before you fondled your first cloudy rock of the island’s favorite amphetamine, 14 days before you met Nate and—by extension—Lucy, and 15 before you were running with the devil, when he asked you, rhetorically, if you’d ever seen a Western.
“You can’t pull that mainland shit,” he lectures. “That impatient, Ivy League, speed racer, pass you on the right side shit. You’re in the wild, wild West now. And stop laughing.”
He’s still panting from the standoff you apparently forced. The trucker cruising at an offensively lazy pace deserved to be passed, fucked with, mooned, whatever, by your unforgiving mainland standards, but Julian, a tourist boat driver at the docks you were recently hired to spray down and maintenance, as well as your ride and only friend to date, intervened before the situation would, in his opinion, inevitably escalate. Julian waits for the hostile fisherman to leave the scene, wrenches the emergency brake off, and lets gravity pull the Jeep down the two-lane highway, searing a glare through the rearview as you giggle at the gross display of testosterone and self-importance just grandstanded on the Route 360 pullout.
He goes on and on and on with the culture lesson, telling you that it’s no joke, brah, and that if you don’t take it seriously you’ll end up raped, shot, or fed to the dogs.
You’re silent.
“There’s love here, lots of love, and you better learn how to find it, survive it, and use it to survive. Or this ripple in your life will not be your trip. At all.”
You’re cruising at dusk against the watercolored sky, the vibrant pinks and oranges and yellows of fruits and flowers melting into a blur of green leaves and mosses and the kind of black so deep and full it creates a mirage of emptiness. He goes 15 below the speed limit and offers a friendly honk and a smile to every vehicle crossing you tonight.
It is annoyingly picturesque; and, true to form, you overestimate your ability to adapt to the soft and subtle spontaneity of island life and depart from your myopic yet lightning-fast lifestyle. And you hear his words repeat in your head, adding your own snarky flair: “This is absolutely not my trip, brah,” and the militia of pink pussy hat-wearing amorphous beings begin to buzz in masturbatory excitement against the threshold of your third eye as you take in the scene before you. Through the windshield, you witness your new home come to life, unraveling with more detail the farther you get from the peak of the volcano and the closer you get to the shore, as the sun continues to sink and the jungle begins to rattle with night fervor.
The drive gifts an all-encompassing view of the island. You see how the littered urban wastelands surround the luxury resorts, and how the jungle looms over this alarming duality of scarcity and abundance, evil and good, island reality and mainland fantasy. The jungle is so wild and lawless that its reign on the island is entire and obsolete. It trickles down veins from the tops of the island’s several volcanoes to the edges of its marvelous and innocent shores, where waves crash violently on barnacles clinging onto land’s edge and sea turtles swim freely in the shallow waters at low tide.
It’s long past darkness when the tires crunch on driveway gravel and he carries you to his couch, concluding a day which you would later look back on as the last in which the fallacy of civilization remained strong and steadfast in the chambers of your skull, and your internal ANTIFA, your radicalized militia of Do the Right Thing pink hat liberals slept in harmony, un-rattled and unfazed by the jungle consuming you.
“Like I said, it’s every man for himself out here,” he whispers goodnight. “Don’t sleep on it.”
It was 15 days before you understood what he meant.
Two
In retrospect, you could have avoided all that was coming if you had listened to Julian in the first place—like trusting Vince, for example. He is the one who groped you. You meet him on a Tuesday when he walks onto your dock barefoot and shirtless, with salt deposits garnishing his sculpted 5’9” body, sun-damaged and scarred from years of tidal shifts. You sneak him some snorkel gear in exchange for the promise of a surfing lesson, which you take him up on the very next sunrise.
It is between sets when the hand finds its way from under the board to the elastic of your bikini bottom, and you tell yourself that the sting of the snapback is from a jellyfish as scared of you as you are of Vince. You catch the wave and lie numb to his trespassing, buoying onto his body at times, knowing you can’t confront him in an ocean without escape.
Alone in the waters, you see yourself how a shark would. Aggravation is not an option, even if you feel like the most vulnerable creature in the Pacific Ocean. You remain relatively unscathed, and take it as a close call. That was lesson number one, and you were not going to admit it to Julian.
Three
A week goes by and you begin to wonder how it is that you live in paradise but don’t let your body rest on a bed of warm sand or wake up to the chatter of fishermen, so at sunset you drag your Osprey to a cove and plop down with some Baldwin. You last one chapter of Giovanni’s Room before you are chased off by a pitbull and a couple of laughing locals. You pop a thumb up like Sissy Hankshaw and keep it up until a woman in a red Chevy drives you to a hostel. You feel defeat more than fear, bruised ego more than weakness. But your relationship with fear would quickly change. You would need to accept it and begin to disobey the chorus of little pink hats in your head telling you to run.
Four
It is only two more days until your privilege of innocence is put to the final test that would finally change your behavior and shift your paradigm. When Vince offers you the meth, you pretend to ponder while you inspect the murky product. You know you won’t take it, but you’re still curious.
There is something about the dirtiness, the casual handoff, the otherworldliness. This isn’t the fine white powder you’re used to gumming behind sticky fraternity doors. It’s not the safe space, not the set nor the setting of psychedelic adventure time at your large and eclectic student cooperative. Your harm reduction education has prepared you for all but this. Your elitism kicks in, and then is kicked to the curb.
Vince and his buddies tell you it will help you, that you’ll be safer at night if you can stay awake throughout it, and the reality of their statement clashes with the privilege of your lifestyle and moral constitution. What you had taken from your tree-humping, non-GMO, cotton-robed, so-called feminist and self-dubbed ally communities; from your disciples of the #metoo movement and the impossible manhater/starfucker duality you practice and defend with hypocritical fervor; from your applause of sexual fluidty and experimentation and, yet still, strictly heteronormative and vanilla practices which never slut-shame, of course, unless it’s against yourself; from your poetry major, snowflake, Tom’s toothpaste, body dysmorphic, crop top-loving walking contradictions; from your meat-lite diet, social justice warrior, Save the Bees, New Green Deal friends; from issues those you love are ardently obsessed with yet have never touched is rendered utterly meaningless in this moment, and from afar, you begin to see it as contrived and impossible.
And all the efforts you had put toward ideology turn away from the abstract and toward the immediate. It is in this moment that you begin to focus on survival—or as Lucy called it, love.
Five
The two of them march down the main street with the theatrics of the Music Man and the ownership of the Mayflower. A weathered Beats pill hangs from Lucy’s forearm and sways with the tempo of her and Nate’s procession, giving bystanders a taste of Van Halen’s 1978 album, Eruption, as they pass.
Hours later, you introduce yourself to Nate, who is leaning on the doorway of the dive bar greeting patrons as if it is his. He has matted roots with golden ends that shine with haphazard care and frame his sharp, brutalistic features veiled in barely-there scruff around eyes as blue as the waters they chased in perpetuity.
He’s shirtless and performative, and every time he beckons people into the joint, he flashes a bicep stained with a blotch of uniform black color that, surely, Rorschach would tell you signals doom, but logic—or perhaps naïveté—tells you is an amended mistake.
Some more public theater and a shared spliff later, you receive the invitation you wanted since witnessing his parade this morning.
“A few of my buddies and I are going to sip some cervezaaaa—” he says, drawing the word out like a party blower, “and jam some tunes. You’ll be there.”
The pussy hats raise their red flags in unanimity, and for the first time you shush them.
Six
You meet Lucy by extension of Nate, though it’s unclear how the two of them met or what the nature of their relationship is, at all.
Lucy was born on this island, which doesn’t appear to be too long ago. She has an indent where a cheekbone should be and she’s missing a chunk of her curly hair, as if she had cut it herself and then changed her mind. The deep scratches on her arm are just starting to scab. When you ask her what happened she calmly credits the waves, which confuses and alarms you because waves don’t have claws like that.
There’s a cow pasture off the highway. You duck under its rusted fences, and follow Lucy to her special rock skipping place. You know she likes to come here because the turtles like it too, and if you’re quiet enough, and patient enough, you can watch them dance until dusk and then depart into the seemingly infinite depths of the waves. Secretly, you know this is an opportunity to learn more about Lucy. You’ve been wanting to ask her if she’s ever thought about going to college.
Lucy speaks on her own terms. She hurdles some slippery rocks and takes you to a spot protected from the wind and the eyes of the highway. She picks at one of the thousands of black spots blanketing the algae-covered terrain and tells you that Nate likes to eat the barnacles, but she’s a vegetarian.
I’m like the barnacles, she says. Sedentary and designed to withstand the biggest wave.
Minutes pass, and she offers nothing more. You take a deep breath and ask her the question that everyone asks you about your partners.
“Do you love Nate?”
She doesn’t move, and you wonder if she even heard you.
“Nate is a turtle,” she finally says, and flings another flat rock into the horizon.
Seven
He says his name is Phoenix. He says he’s on molly and that’s why he wants a hug. That’s why he’s demanding a hug. In your tent. In your space. In your night.
Nate tells you the same that Julian did: to play dumb and stay silent, to ragdoll and let the men handle it. Lucy retracts into her shell and shudders into sleep, and you wonder if you can eventually become as skilled as she is. You’ve learned to not aggress, just as you’ve learned that the safest way to sleep out here is with a man by your side, in case someone needs to fight the Phoenixes reaching for the zipper on your tent.
Feathers ruffled by territorialism, patriarchy, lust, and greed are now ones you are grateful to bury yourself into, stroke and kiss. What your progressive teachings had trained you to fight, you now learn to appease as a form of survival. And the little radicalized, they/them, clueless and indignant soldiers in your head start throwing off their pink knit hats in rage at your barbaric failure. The fatal flaw of such college-educated (and socialized), post-Trump election empowerment is that it renders its subjects with a false sense of invincibility, as if being equipped with the education of theoretical or ideal morality guarantees a veil of self-preservation.
Nate scares off Phoenix and returns. He pins you down, slipping in and out of your control until you finally relinquish the last of your power to his primal, island authority. There’s a thrill in disobeying your mainland teachings, and still power in being intentionally rebellious. You smile, thinking of how your friends at home would be shocked and disappointed. It’s masochism at its finest, and it makes you feel in control again.
The Beats pill dies and the Little Dreamer herself shifts in her sleep exposing her healing scars. You join her, drinking in the tent air now saltier than the tide-pools just yards away.
Eight
You think of what Lucy said about love, and start to see love as a verb rather than a confectionary noun. A love that’s an action more than a feeling—a relentless fuck you to world that consumes you but doesn’t monetarily value you, and to a system that rewards those who greed and forces others to choose between acting out of survival or following their hearts.
You scold yourself. Of course you use the convention of the ambiguous other—the anonymous “he” to vilify, or at least to project your demons on. Perhaps it started to take form in your mind as a specific individual. Perhaps you’re lying to yourself now and it was about a lover you could describe with impeccable accuracy and insight.
Or perhaps you’re not that deep at all.
Nine
The headline says that the dead man washed up on the shore early this morning. There’s no photo, but the reporter says he was found with bruises all around his neck and traces of MDMA in his blood. You simultaneously ignore and believe her.
At this point you’ve been accepted by the locals, and Nate and Lucy treat you to a day in their life: dumpster diving first, cliff diving second. Lucy doesn’t jump, but by now you’ve learned to turn off concern. Before sunset, Nate picks coconuts and cracks them with his bare hands, and you think of them cradling your jaw the night before. You try again to talk to Lucy, but she is more cryptic than ever.
Ten
You don’t know it yet, but it’s your last night on the island. A drum circle pulls the sun into reddish heaviness and slowly crescendos in an invitation to the moon. It’s been months since you’ve seen Nate or Lucy, but you don’t have to see their faces to notice the faint sounds of “Jamie’s Cryin” over the relentless ipu heke, or to spot a figure in the shadows skipping rocks into the darkening sea.
Your eyes pan the twilight crowd in search of a tent to sleep in and you feel like Lucy, and Nate, and the turtles, and the barnacles all in one. You are the ocean, vast and profound and self-sufficient, in constant motion to maintain your own state of being and play the strange game of survival that Lucy once called love.
Waves crash on barnacles and sway the turtles in psychedelic exit; they lick at your scabbed toes and invite goosebumps as the day takes its warmth and innocence away. The tide rolls back on island lawlessness and reveals a path to freedom that was, at the beginning of the summer, covered in inches of saltwater elitism. You’re unmoved by the elements but infused with the power of your own volition as your militia readies to run for their lives, or into the arms of another, or even toward complete solitude. You’re unfazed by the gyrating drum circle or the chill on your back or the absence of the rock skipper as the sun drips down the horizon of the Pacific, fading into a deep, empty black like the end scene of your favorite Western.
Natalie Silver is a native Californian who recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Media Studies. She believes that the critical millennial voice is the most prolific threat to contemporary systems of oppression, and she would rather die than work in tech. Alas, she fell into independent journalism.
