The Magnet

Issue No. 2 | Limantour Beach

August 24, 2019

I had no agenda. I’d written down some things that I’d been curious to see, but having a pre-planned schedule of things to do in a place I’ve never been feels funny sometimes when I actually arrive there. How could a past-version of myself possibly know what a future-version of myself would like to do, in a place the past-version of me has never been? Sometimes on vacations I look at the itinerary the past-version of me labored over only a few weeks earlier as if it were written by a stranger. There are often adjustments needing to be made. Half the time I wonder if I should scrap the itinerary entirely and spend the majority of time laying in bed. I question from where this internal pressure has come, to do and see everything I can in the small window I’ve allotted for myself. If I do choose to sleep away my vacation, there is no one to scold me for my laziness. So when I do leave the bed to do things, in this school of thought, I end up feeling very adult, very responsible. 

I’d left the remaining nine days of my vacation open because I’d anticipated my partner flying to California to join me for the second half of the trip. But we’d broken up three hours before my flight was scheduled to depart for the first half of the trip.

The last day we were a couple I’d left work in the evening in high spirits and headed home to finish packing for my overnight flight. I called them to discuss the ride they’d previously offered me to the airport. An argument erupted. It lasted approximately three hours. There was lots of crying, a bounty of tension. During one segment I left my house and roamed the aisles of Target looking for battery powered alarm clocks with my phone fixed to my cheek. Toward the end of the call I asked them not to come, not to meet me out west. At this stage of the argument I was en route to drop off my car off at a cousin’s house nearby so that I wouldn’t get any tickets while away. I’d just run over a curb, nearly clipping a fire hydrant in my hysteria, and was parked on the side of the road. “This isn’t healthy for either of us,” I croaked with my forehead against the steering wheel. I asked if we could meet up to have coffee so that we could get some closure when I returned in three weeks. “I'm so sorry this is happening this way,” I said, “I love you.” They hung up on me. The call ended at 11PM. I finished the drive to my cousin’s house and surrendered my Mitsubishi to the night. I called a car to deliver me home. By 2AM I opened my front door to exit my apartment and enter the Lyft poised in the street to take me to the airport. I looked down and noticed my partner had left two containers of all my things, and all the things I’d given them during our relationship, for me to experience before embarking. The things were scattered in a heap on my porch table, like they’d been dumped in a haste. One of the containers was a torn, cardboard Fed-ex envelope. Their name was still printed on the side. Items spilled out of it; my toothbrush, underwear, trinkets, a plastic slug, a hand-stitched pillow I’d sewn with a funny phrase on the front in Hungarian. I ran my fingers over the black threads that wavered along the seams of the pillow. I picked up the envelope and raked my fingers inside to see what else had been deposited. A pink, silicon butt-plug peeked out at me. Bits of their pubic hair were still attached to it. This was most disturbing and made me feel sick; felt disturbed and hostile. There were colorful rocks knocking around from the inside as I turned the envelope to different angles, teal and opal ones, ones I’d plucked from the ground on a chilly hike in Phoenix last February. The rocks glinted in the prisms of the security flood light mounted to the brick wall above my head. I could picture my ex pacing around their apartment snatching everything from the perimeter that reminded them of me, the envelope the first receptacle they found, probably from their kitchen counter or the crest of the kitchen trash. It distressed me that they’d breached the boundary of my porch within the last hour without my knowing; positioned directly beside my bedroom window. I wondered if they’d heard me talking on the phone with my best friend in Chicago, if they’d lingered by the window listening to the call. I didn’t know it then, but this breach of boundaries would continue to violate me for the next six months. I would think about it every time I turned the lights off and climbed into bed, wondering if they’d come back for me some night, unhinged. I dragged the boxes and items inside the house, spilling into a trail on the floor, and left them there, just beyond the front door. I’d manage them upon my return. 

My overnight flight in such a condition was hellish and when I arrived in sunny California in the ripeness of morning my face was swollen and bloodshot. I looked severely strung out. As much as I tried not to, I sent a few curt texts when I landed condemning them for leaving the objects on my patio. I picked up my rental car and drove it so Marin Headlands. I bought a sandwich in a small and overly-priced bodega, parked in the lot beside Rodeo Beach, rolled down my windows and fell asleep for two hours. When I woke up at 3PM I checked into my room in the hostel and spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening easing into my body and recalibrating my nervous system. I read my book for hours on the couch in the community lounge and fell asleep at 7:30PM. I thought that was the end of the ordeal.

At 8AM the next day I pulled my joggers from my suitcase, laced up my sneakers and went for a run along a trail that wound beside a windy cliff’s edge. I was surprised when my phone dinged one hundred times, flooding with cell signal for the first time since I’d arrived, and I received the most cinematic, long-winded text solidifying the breakup in what I interpreted as their best attempt at a heroic, quixotic means to an end. The text felt most apocryphal to me. From the cliffside I screenshot the text and forwarded it to my best friend. I plugged one ear with my finger and held the phone to my other ear. I knew she’d answer even though she’d be partying on a bachelorette cruise somewhere in the Caribbean ocean, filled with margaritas. I heard her voice crack onto the line but the call wavered in and out of reception so I blindly stomped through tall wet grass and clay sediment until the her annunciations become louder and louder. I noticed a mother and son watching me from a nearby parking lot, and I looked around realizing that I was crouched in an area marked with yellow tape and adjacent to towering signs that read “DO NOT STEP HERE” and “DANGEROUS UNEVEN TURF.” I felt like a zoological specimen. In a way, I felt it’d be to my advantage if this patch of earth cracked in half and slid into the gaping ocean. My friend’s voice traveled from her speaker to mine over the line and to say some disparaging things about his character and it helped. Almost every day forward I’d check in with her. She’d ask me from one poolside or another, her amazement compounding every time, “are you really not going to write him back?” I never did.

And so there I was eleven days later, at Point Reyes Hostel, lying on my back on the bottom bunk of my bedroom in the middle of the day, with the duck-feather comforter pulled up to my chest. I stared blankly at the bottom-side slats of the bunk above me. Thick wooden slats. Navy sheets poked and hung through the bars. There was a long, narrow window on the wall above my head, which I liked. The window made me feel like I was outside, even when I was inside, and a linen curtain flirted lightly in the exhalations of the wind. In my periphery I could see the sky through the screen. It looked pink and gray in the reflected light against the fog. Throaty belches of a crow’s call burped into the bedroom, and I felt comforted by the proximity of living things, things with heartbeats. A notebook lay closed next to my face with a pen on top. I wrote so few words during that time, but I felt so much. I was in a kind of numbness from the deafening percussion of a profound sting. 

Some afternoons I couldn’t get out of bed. And I didn’t really need to. That’s what happens when you schedule a block of nine consecutive days at a beach hostel in the center of an ocean-side National Park, sixty miles from the nearest city. The hostel was a petite wood cabin. There was no wifi. Only one Dell computer sat in a corner of the common area with very slow dial up. If I wanted to talk to my family or check an email I had to drive thirty minutes along treacherous roads with helix curves, obscured by walls of fog, to the closest town with a grocery store and a single bar. I did this from time to time to break up the monotony. 

The previous night some hostel employees had formed a semicircle around the receptionist desk and shot the shit. They were all women, about my age, and I was envious of their unity while my friends were one thousand miles away on the opposite coast. It felt nice to be in the vicinity of such conversations. Lounged on a leather love-seat reading, I wanted to let my book fall slack and say something pertinent to include myself. I let the urge pass so as not to disrupt the melody of their colloquy which I valued more than my own involvement. They discussed how one of the girls who lived in a shed beside the hostel had spent the day cutting down invasive grasses that grow along the perimeters of the building. The invasive grass is called Cortaderia Jubata. “Jubata,” she spat, for short, and the word sounded novelty and carbonated on her lips. Jubata is native to South America. I’d recognized which grasses were Jubata and naively found it appealing. I felt ashamed that I wasn’t aware of such intellectual botanical information. I wondered what it was like to have strawberry blonde hair, live in a shack thirty miles from the closest, and yet smallest, town, and if my life would be fuller and less complicated if I knew more about and dealt exclusively with Jubata plants. 

I got out of bed around three PM feeling peckish. I walked barefoot from the community bedroom into the community kitchen and pulled a damp, sad looking double-bagged paper sack out of the refrigerator and slugged it onto a square, wooden, island table which anchored the center of the room. The kitchen was a deserted landscape of silvery metal rectangles; pots, pans, utensils, knives, and coffee apparatuses hung from their places on the walls in a visual amalgam. I selected tools I needed from the walls and broke a simple egg into a pan over low heat. I stood quietly watching dimples bubble in its milky-white edges. The hostel was barren midday, but artifacts of human life were evident in the slightest trail of coffee grounds on the counter-top. When I squinted harder at them, I discovered they actually ants, inching out from a silverware drawer. I remembered the woman manning the desk had mentioned an ant infestation problem. Sunlight streamed through the windows across the trail of their bodies. Most tenants were out either hiking trails through the beach scrub or in repose down by the water’s edge. My Levi jeans hung comfortably at my navel. A black one-piece bathing suit was still underneath my clothes and acting as a shirt, stretched over cold, tannish skin.

One of the hostel employees from the night before—the one thrashing Jubata grass—entered the kitchen through the swinging door. She floated past me and began preparing a sandwich. I didn’t mean to stare at her, but it was difficult not to. She moved quietly and gracefully, like a specter would, but doing human things like pulling dishes from the cabinets and heaving a massive Tupperware from the shelf. The plastic bin had a piece of masking tape adhered to the lid with black markered letters. The label read “Karen” in clumsy human handwriting. Karen lifted the lid and rummaged through the innards of cardboard cracker boxes and cans for her desired ingredients. Karen was white, but her flesh kept a pinkish glow from the sun. My stepmom used to say “you have sun trapped in your skin” after a beach day and I always speculated on the scientific possibilities of that. Her hair, which also blushed, was fluffy and bundled in a tousle under a fisherman’s hat. A sun dress of thin, apathetic fabric hung from her clavicles. I turned and leaned forward on the kitchen island. “Do you work here?” I asked in my most approachable tones. She looked up with a relaxed smile and said yes. I asked her what was up with all the signs along the walkway to the beach—the severe ones about forbidding the removal or relocation of wild plants or animals, dead or alive. “Does that happen frequently?” I asked. “What kind of wildlife?” “Well,” she began, but several hostelites entered the kitchen and initiated their own bustling routines of food preparation. They moved around me and Karen as if by communicating with her I was a ghost now too. She continued in the same tranquil intonation, “two whales washed up this summer. So they were exposed on the beach for a long time. Typically the tide will wash the sand up over them and cover them, and it did. And normally you’d call animal control to come and take them away, but it's different here since this is a national park. We prefer to let nature take its course. So they will probably wash up again at some point—their bones. I’ve found vertebrae and backbones down there. All kinds of stuff. Actually I found whale vertebrae just yesterday.” 

I asked her the location of where exactly the vertebrae laid.