My Mother’s Coast

I am not sure yet what any of this - the notebooks, the ferry, my mother's silence about this exact coastline - is going to turn into. Probably nothing. I took the overnight ferry up the Kamchatka coast this week because she would not, and has not, in the twenty-some years I have been asking. She grew up somewhere along this grey water and left as soon as the paperwork allowed.

The crossing did not cooperate. Half a day in, a wave came over the rail while I was leaning into the wind trying to feel something appropriately significant, and it hit like a decision made without me. I came up drenched, glasses fogged, laughing before I had decided to.

I did not find her house. I am not sure it is still standing. What I found instead was the temperature of the place - the specific grey of that sky, the sound the deck makes underfoot. I do not know what to do with any of it yet. I am writing it down anyway.