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Strongly Ambivalent About Love
Love means never having to say you’re certain
I walked barefoot along the water’s edge where the sand and the sea and the sky blurred to gray. Cracked crab shells and jellyfish littered the beach. I kept my focus on my feet but sensed a slick dark figure bobbing in the breakers; a body surfer in a wetsuit, I figured. I turned to look. Muted light on the waves bounced and rolled like pewter coins. I shaded my eyes.
“Hey,” a stranger on the beach called to me. “Do you know you have a seal following you?”
“Yes,” I said, though that became true only as I said it.
The seal raised herself from the water then, head, neck, and sloped shoulders bared. Her eyes, wide set, and watery black stared straight into my own.
My husband jokes that I am part selkie. In Celtic legend, selkies are curious seals cursed to live as humans. Sometimes they are described as fallen angels condemned to live as seals. The mythology is fluid. But the recurring theme is of a tortured soul torn between two worlds, unable to settle in either.
In one tale, an emotionally detached young mother spends hours staring longingly at the Irish sea while her neglected brood ran wild. The children discover an old trunk and, inside, a shiny seal skin. They present the found…
