I crept carefully into the darkened gymnasium. A low, orange glow painted the bleachers and equipment from the emergency lights above. The gym had been built on the beach so that the ocean could come under the wall at high tide and fill the deep swimming pool at the western edge. Through the darkness I could see the gentle waves of sea as they lapped onto the hard linoleum. The sea lions were there; I could sense them despite the calm surface of the inky water. My heart pounded in my chest. My hands were shaking. He was there, too. He had to be.

It was a mistake, the first time I came to the gymnasium at night. I forgot my keys in the locker room, and I could not get into my cabin. I had entered the gym through an open window. He had been there, standing in a beam of moonlight: a perfect, beautiful, ordinary boy. He had floppy hair and long, graceful fingers. He had been wearing an old pair of sweatpants and a mesh pinnie. I was in love with him from that first moment. But he was not an ordinary boy at all, and when dawn came he would turn back into a sea lion.

He had to stay wet, that was the tricky part of being in love with a sea lion boy, and we would meet in the empty locker room where we would talk over the sound of the shower. Sometimes I would stand under the shower, too, and walk back to my cabin shivering violently in the freezing dawn.

I stole along under the bleachers, keeping out of sight of the water's edge. I imagined the sea lions watching me from the blackness, their dark, penetrating eyes exposing my secret. They looked so friendly and playful during the day, but they were the only thing my love was afraid of.

All at once he appeared, taking me into his wet arms, smiling through the darkness, kissing my hair, silent but ebullient. He cast furtive glances through the bleachers towards the water, but the water was still. We made our way towards the locker room.

Neither of us saw the shapes in the darkness until it was too late. We stopped short in the same breath, but the sea lions were already upon us. They wrenched our arms apart. They dragged us into the center of the gym, towards the water. I struggled against them, but their mammoth weight was immovable. They pulled him into the dark water. I saw his hand become a flipper as it disappeared under the surface. I could see their dark shapes as they pulled him deeper. They held him fast. They were drowning him. They were drowning him. They were drowning him.

I broke away from the slippery flippers of the sea lions. I dove headlong into the pool. The sea lions terrified me. They were the perfect predators of the sea. They thrashed and dove like lightning through the three-dimensional battlefield of water. I dove. I dove and dove until my ears threatened to explode. I swallowed and dove deeper, my eyes locked on the sea lion that was my everything. When I reached him the sea lions that had been holding him let go. They seemed impressed by my wild desperation. I put my arms around him. He was still. His natural buoyancy helped me pull him to the surface. I rolled him with all of my strength onto the dry land. The sea lions grabbed me again and dragged me away from him.

"If he had stayed in the water, he would have stayed a sea lion forever," said the chief sea lion. "Now, when he becomes dry, he will stay a human forever."

I screamed. I fought against the wet, blubbery fins of the sea lions. I had thought that they were drowning him. Now I had made an irreversible decision for him that I did not feel like it was my place to make. If he became a human he could never again be a sea lion. It would be my fault. I wanted in every bone of my body for him to be a human, for him to want to be a human so that he could be with me, but that was his choice, it was not mine. I collapsed into sobs. He lay still, slowly drying.


I woke up.

---

"You're right, I would have wanted to be a sea lion," said Shark Boy.
"I'm sorry," I said emotionally. Even though he was joking, and it was a dream, it stung me very hard for some reason to hear him imply that he wouldn't have chosen to stay with me.
"It's ok," he said, conciliatory, in a way that made it seem like it was.

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Throughout the years of my youth, I was consumed with an all-encompassing wanderlust, an unstoppable desire to move, to keep moving, to see the world, to travel across every continent on Earth.

So I did.

Now I am suddenly consumed with an all-encompassing desire to stay put. Get a real job, have a garden, buy a dog. Own something and fix it up. Is this what happens when you turn 28?

Oh well, I guess it's time to go see some Viennese palaces and eat some wienerschnitzel while planning my next trip to Morocco.

Ciao.

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For some reason I was always aware of her skeleton. Perhaps it was because when she arrived she was thin and her hair was sparse, and when I rubbed my hand along her side I could feel her ribs, her pelvis, her elbows, her tail. Apart from her skeleton there was only her eyes, which contained the non-physical part of her being and which were profound and sad. When we paid her attention her skeleton would wriggle back and forth in a frenzied manner, as if all of her ribs were connected by single threads of tendon, forced into waves by the motion of her tail. When we ignored her she sank with a deep and heavy sigh into the corner, stared a thousand yard stare, and thought deep and heavy thoughts. Perhaps had she not been a dog she would have agitated for justice, or spoken out against abuse. But as she was a dog, she was a philosopher, and as a philosopher-dog her stomach sometimes won out over her mind when she made decisions. I knew her muscles well, having spent hours massaging them. Her skin slid in a rubbery sheet across her ribs as if it were only attached at several critical points around the edges. In return for my attentions I received a patient and thorough bath from her wide and methodical tongue. Together we felt like more than two beings, like between us there was a large black space filled with colliding galaxies.

She's been gone a long time now. In my memories she is tinged in golden afternoon sunlight. The scaffolding of the dog, of which I was so aware, turned out to be an order of magnitude less important than what hung from it, what lived with in it, what filled its spaces with flesh and blood.

I miss her.

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I look up at the cliffside. So this is Mercury.

For some reason I always thought that I would go to the Moon first. "Is this what it would be like to walk on the Moon?" I wonder, thinking of the Apollo astronauts who went before. But it doesn't matter now. I'm walking on Mercury.

The outcrop is made of massive gray bedrock. It towers over me, and spreads out to either side, impassable. All along the cliff I can see the sparkling of different kinds of beautiful minerals. Rubies, sapphires, amethyst, lepidolite, topaz, calcite, all in gorgeous perfect crystals a least a foot long. One after the next I place them carefully into a black plastic garbage bag. I look up. The other astronauts. "Hey, what's up, are you ready to start looking at the outcrop now?"

I hide the plastic bag full of beautiful minerals behind my back.

"What's that there, have you already collected some cool stuff?"

I sigh heavily and bring them all carefully out of the bag again to show my colleagues. Each one is a glittering beauty, a perfect type specimen of all of the most beautiful minerals known. Better yet, the appearance of each one in the outcrop revolutionizes our understanding of the planet Mercury.




Sometimes I wish I could just stay asleep forever.
#twasbutadream

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And then there is the question of Henry.

Henry and I have been friends since March of 2007. We travel in the same circles, we tend to do similar things. He went to UCLA, I went to Pomona. He went to Yale, I went to Brown. We've both lived in Bremen, Germany. We've both traveled to Antarctica. Henry's friends look just like my friends.

Only I have no idea who Henry is.

The only way that I know that I am friends with Henry is that Facebook tells me that it is so. We have no mutual friends. We were both in Bremen but not at the same time. We were both in Antarctica but not at the same time, or for the same reason. We are both scientists but he studies marine ecology.

Who are you, Henry?

I waste a good half-an-hour looking through photographs of Henry to try to determine where he fits into my life. There are any number of ways that I could know him, but nearly all of these should have left a trail of "mutual friends" from which I could devise our mysterious association. How did I know you, Henry? And why did I forget you?

Henry has a beautiful girlfriend. She looks like a model. She's an excellent photographer, and Henry's facebook photos benefit dramatically from the fact that she's in love with him. Many of the photos have that hipster, instagram feel to them, making them look like old pictures of somebody's parents when they were young.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Henry were my father. What if he died right before I was born, and these facebook photos and my mom's memories were the only thing I had remaining of him? There he was, scuba diving in the Antarctic. There he is, catching giant cod up north. There he is dressed like a hippie, drinking a cocktail in an empty open-air tropical bar. Diving into waterfalls, wearing silly hats, presenting marine biology studies to the UN, preparing to eat raw eels, juggling coconuts. Wearing aviators and smiling a mega-watt smile, his muscled and tanned arm around my beautiful mother. Would he have inspired me to go to Yale? Would I have inherited from him a love for the sea?

I never knew him. My whole life had been defined by his absence. You could cut him out of that picture with my mother and if you pasted me in I'd never be big enough to fill up the hole that he'd left behind.

I came out of my imagination. How the hell did I know Henry? I didn't do anything in March of 2007!

I asked my old roommate if she'd ever heard of him. Nope. I tried to explain my fun game of redefining my relationship to someone in my head and then seeing how that would change my emotional reaction to their facebook photos. She didn't really say anything, but I could tell that she thought I was crazy. Oh well. Maybe games like that should stay in my head. I wonder what Henry Sr. would have thought?

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So I'm back in La Frawnce.

Houston was filled with amazing things, including my friends, my colleagues, and so much BBQ and honey mustard sauce I almost died from pleasure. Teriyaki sauce, too, cannot be overlooked.

After Houston I went to Florida to visit Sharkboy, where we naturally fished for sharks:


What I didn't previously appreciate about sharks is how adorable they are.

Little sharkshark. Lil' sharky sharkster. Aw.

Upon my return, I saw a weird french movie starring Chris Rock (!) and I ate a bucket o' mussels, a french onion soup, and some beef bourguignon.

I'm on the path towards learning everything there is to know about sulfur (for my job) but I've been very distracted by 1. The principles of American democracy 2. Capitalism vs. Socialism 3. Colonial India 4. China's One Child policy 5. Overpopulation 6. Bawdy Limericks 7. 9gag.

Not necessarily in that order.

Luckily I bought myself a very expensive library card and I am now free to enable all of my distractions to consume me.

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