Off island

My son and I ferried off to go stay with some friends from LA, who have just purchased a home in East Dennis. The fast ferry covered the distance between Oak Bluffs and Hyannis in an hour. It was lovely seeing our friends. But I felt a bit like a character out of the show, "Lost," if they were to go back into civilization after being marooned for so many years on that sliver of land surrounded by turquoise waters. Shock was the main emotion to be back on the main land with freeways and distractions of civilized life. I hadn't realized how cocooned I was on this island for so many weeks where driving at 45 miles per an hour is speeding. This shock is ridiculous when you think about the fact I was on the CAPE, another vacation destination of small towns dotted with genteel homes, windy streets, and beaches. It isn't as if I had driven off the island on to the New Jersey Turnpike, for goodness sake.

I think the shock was coupled with a sense of displacement for being with an LA friend, someone intimately identified with life back there, the place to which I will not be returning. Our son, who had been stalwart about all of these radical changes to his life, finally succumbed and cried for all that he was leaving behind--namely, our house. His plaintive cries at 3:00 in the morning, despite my foggy head from the couple bottles of wine we had consumed, made me realize the significance of leaving the Vineyard for New York. How that ferry ride, as we crossed the Sound to get on land, will truly be the start of our lives starting anew. Our time here is too quickly coming to an end. And with its end will be the start of all the new beginnings of which I had yearned, dreamed, and wept for for so many years.

It was sad to say good-bye to our friends since we knew it would be a few months before we would see one another again. I wondered why it was we hadn't gotten together sooner since we were so physically nearby, all relative, of course. For me, this time to breathe, to face ahead instead of the constant gazing back, had kept me from calling to say we were coming, or to ask them to come here. I needed the time to put it all, our relationship, into context, I guess, a survival mechanism for me. All too quickly, our conversations will be sharing the larger details of our lives, to recount our lives in big brush strokes instead of the finer etchings we had shared. Our connections of people we had both known will fade as less of those relationships are maintained on my end and on theirs'. The disentanglement of my previous life from my life now has happened quickly, and in some way, with finality. There are few people I keep in touch with now. The need to keep up the daily correspondence all withered away with the distance and disconnection.

These last couple of weeks remaining on the island will give me time to prepare for what is ahead. I'm anxious to get started, to establish routines in the city. And I'm excited about finding the rhythms to work again, to throw myself headlong into this new longer project.