Combing Through Jellyfish
by Rebecca Rowe
A few days ago I told someone who I’ve known for about two months now that they didn’t know me—an impulsive and rude response designed to veer us away from the nice, soft, emotional conversation she intended to have with me. She responded with a scoff, followed by “What do I have to know about you to know you?”. A smarter response than I anticipated. I didn’t answer, she didn’t pry. I have been thinking about it since. What could I tell her to answer that question? I know trivial things like my favorite color or the kind of music I listen to wouldn’t cut it, but I can’t say I know what would. When I think about the people in my life that I know deeply I think it comes down to knowing the things that have shaped them and how they see the world, the things they think a.bout I think about a lot of things, so it’s hard to know what would be a good place to begin. Since family is a sort of biological starting point it might make sense to start there.
Eleanor
My nana was not a grandma in the typical sense. She never cooked for me, and every birthday gift she sent me indicated that she was unsure of how old I really was. I don’t think we ever talked on the phone. I don’t blame her for this—Nana’s mind had gone long before I was alive—and I was one of thirty-some grandchildren. I didn’t live on Long Island like the majority of my cousins, so I didn’t get to know her much. She was my grandmother only by default. I know she hated Canadians and that she loved Lay’s potato chips. The longest period of time we ever spent together was at a Denny’s; we said nothing to each other directly and she took two hours to eat a stack of blueberry pancakes. I wasn’t upset by this lack of relationship. If anything it was a weight off my shoulders to know that my presence wasn’t notable for her. Nana couldn’t really know me. She didn’t seem to expect anything from me.
Two years before she passed she fell under the belief that my brothers and I were in fact not my father’s children. She sent a scathing and overall nonsensical letter to my dad about it—one of many he’d received from her in his life. I’m not sure what my dad said back to her about it. It’s likely he said nothing. If he did say anything it didn’t faze her. For the last two years of her life we didn’t talk and she did not send me an age-inappropriate birthday gift. It wasn’t much of a transition.
I have realized that the things I did know about her were more my expectations than they were pieces of her. I knew some of her habits and I knew how she made me feel, but those things cannot define a person. Perhaps this was the safest and the most accessible way to go about knowing someone who was so erratic. Expectations are not meant to last, though. They are bound to become unreliable with time. Maybe that sounds pessimistic or distrusting, but I don’t see it that way. How do you place accurate expectations on an ever-changing mind? What a frustration it is to be blamed for growing out of the box someone else has made for you. I think the kindest and most realistic thing we can expect from the people in our lives is that they will change. Sometimes I grow uneasy or fearful of changes that may come. Sometimes I am so relieved by the thought that growth is inevitable. Maybe if Nana had lived longer, or if I had been a less guarded person when she was alive, we would have seen more of each other.
My Dad has never spoken to me much about her, maybe this is because he lived a similar experience—tethered to her by blood but being born too late to know her for who she was. Perhaps he doesn’t talk about her because he just doesn’t want to, I figure the stories that come from a childhood as a sibling of eight with a schizophrenic mother aren’t exactly easy to tell. He has told me over and over again that he hates Long Island, and I have to infer that it has more to do with his ties there and less to do with his other reasons—the heat, the traffic, the people, etc. I think it’s a valid assumption. I don’t particularly like it there either and it’s certainly more about the bad memories than it is about the faults of the transportation system.
I see his avoidance in myself, blatantly at times. Ideally I would like to harness the lessons I have learned without having to carry the moments in which they were taught. I know this is not only detrimental, but impossible as well. I try to work against the instinct, I have to remember myself to know who I am now. I try to put myself back on Long Island- it would be a moot point to reflect on my formative years without making note of the setting. There is perspective to be gained that way also. I think I learned shame too young, and I found too many things about myself to hide and more ways to hide them than anyone could ever need. But there are worse places to discover shame than in the ocean.
Common Misconceptions of a Beachgoer
Jellyfish lay eggs, but it’d be unusual for you to see them. The eggs sink once released, eventually situating themselves on rocks, waiting out the short while it takes for them to develop. This is something I didn’t know until recently—not that they lay eggs, that part seems pretty logical to me—but I’ve been carrying some misconceptions about them for a while now. I thought they were larger than they are, free floating orbs you could find readily in the sea. It’s not a notion that makes sense, but maybe sense is an unfair quality to look for in childhood memories.
A trip to Long Island meant two things to me when I was young. It meant I was going to see my dad’s family and that I was going to swim in the ocean. We’d usually go for a weekend, four days maybe if it was a holiday. Agenda setting was not in my dad’s nature, so the days were pretty free form. Someone always made sure that my brothers and I got to the beach at some point, a childhood away from the coast did not sit right with my aunts and uncles. Jones Beach was the closest beach to my Aunt Pam and Uncle John’s house, where we usually stayed when we were visiting. Typically Jones Beach was crowded, densely packed with children living out rambunctious pursuits and adults engaging in constant efforts to corral them. I would hear the reverb of all this activity intermixed with the crashing of waves and wails of seagulls the moment the car pulled into the parking area. I knew from my mom that parking was always a nightmare.
Once, on an abnormal day when the sky remained a pale gray, and the Long Island heat had subsided to more of a heavy humidity, we found ourselves among few patrons. My brothers and I took the opportunity of a nearly vacant ocean readily, allowing the waves to engulf us before our mom could air out her warnings about high tide. I doubt warnings would have done me any good. I trusted the ocean. I always swam farther than my brothers would, this was true even on this day, when the waves moved with such force and came down with such a bite that it seemed they were pushing me back intentionally. This sort of hubris guided me straight into the high tide, and in not too much time the ocean sent me straight back. Once a wave has decided you are coming with it to the shore there is no escaping. All your bodily autonomy is shelved, a series of underwater somersaults later and suddenly you have returned to the beach you started at, only now with your hair tangled and a burning sensation in your lungs.
I could shake off the physical discomfort and the personal embarrassment of being regurgitated by the waves, but something was amiss. My head was awkwardly heavy on my shoulders. My hair had somehow been congealed, there were no individual strands, only one entirely bound mess. My mom must have been inspecting me for signs of injury when she noticed that her child had returned from the ocean with what seemed like hundreds of small, gelatinous balls knotted in her hair. Combing through the dense layers of my wet hair, she was aghast. She asked what all these things in my hair were. I certainly did not know. It was a new sight for my aunt and uncle as well. They weighed the options while I sat there on the sand, two pairs of hands picking through my hair now, discomfort mounting. Someone concluded that it was jellyfish season, and that somehow, my violent journey back from the ocean had left my hair a vessel for jellyfish eggs.
Jellyfish eggs. The words themselves look uncomfortable together, unsure what to do with themselves out in the open like that. Maybe that’s because that’s not what they really were, thinking about it out loud it seems pretty preposterous. I never thought to question it until recently, I suppose once I had rid my person of mysterious sea orbs I had wanted to rid my mind of them as well. One brief investigation on the internet and I have the true answer to my mom’s original question, salps. Salps, small, gelatinous zooplankton that are often mistaken for jellyfish, apparently. They’re fascinating really. They bear more evolutionary ties to humans than they do to jellyfish, so perhaps this isn’t so surprising being me and the salps found ourselves in such similarly uncomfortable positions at Jones Beach.
Lots of these trips meld together for me. I think that’s the way of a lot of childhood memories, important moments stick out, emboldened, but situating them within the humdrum of time is difficult. The memories are fragmented, falling onto a timeline that is loose at best. I couldn’t really say how old I was when I had my run in with the salps. Anywhere from the ages of six to ten probably. A time when Long Island felt like a vacation—a world away from what I knew, for better or for worse. Now it is somewhere familiar. The ocean holds less mystique than it once did and my relatives have cemented their place in my brain. My feelings have evolved. I struggle to separate how I see Long Island as a place, an entity, and how I feel towards what it holds. The lack of distinction troubles me. I don’t want to discount a place of its positives because it has amalgamated into something negative for me. I have allowed myself to paint an ugly mental picture. I have stored away overheard arguments. I have memorized how the dust settled in Nana’s house. I hung onto the feelings of water in my lungs and the relief of a visit coming to a close. These are the memories that prevail. I am sad to admit that. Partially because I know that’s not what it is, and partially because I am sad I allowed myself to forget so much. I want to remember making an older cousin laugh and doing underwater handstands. I want to remember sunshowers and sandcastles and greasy food. I want to tell of seeing fireflies for the first time, how they circled the air in my uncle’s backyard and how I couldn’t fathom that such a small light could be so bright. I want to give them the recognition they deserve. Selfishly, I want whoever I tell to see me as someone who thinks fireflies deserve recognition.
Packing Up
I wonder what I would say, if she asked me again. The truth is I don’t know, I think it’s a difficult question at its core. I have thought for so long and in so many directions. I have found some answers but I don’t know how many and in what combination would suffice. That’s okay. Trying to retain full authenticity while I try to present myself authentically is starting to feel unrealistic—people are not presentations of themselves. I think it is not so much something that could be told rather than shown. Knowing myself is knowing the spaces I came to be and the people I have come to reflect. I picture these things in a tote bag, or maybe one of those blue storage bins—a compartmentalizer at my core. I see it in the corner of a room, not in anyone’s way but not really in a place that makes the most sense. I would sit down with it, and I would say “I guess this is what you need to know about me to know me” and I would take things out one by one. Some things would look new, well-kept. Some would be haphazardly wrapped in newspaper or coated in a thin sheen of dust. I worry that I might pull something out that is unrecognizable to me, something dark, shapeless, heavy. She might ask me what that one is, and I certainly would not know. I think that would be okay though, it would have to be. I cannot expect to understand everything I carry just because I want to—because I am more comfortable when things are labeled. Time will show me new ways to recognize what I cannot yet discern. I try to trust that.
~
Rebecca Rowe is a SUNY-ESF student majoring in Environmental Science.
Featured image: Photograph of jellyfish by Jeffrey Hamilton, 2018.
Artist note: I started writing this essay in response to a prompt regarding what defines a place, and how we construct these definitions based on our own experiences. Initially, I struggled to land on a specific place or location that I felt strongly enough towards to write in detail about. I began writing about the things that were bouncing around in my head just to get something down, and through that I looked for a way to connect the ideas of defining a person and defining a place. Since there is no one way to answer the initial question “What do I have to know about you to know you?” I wrote the piece in sections, attempting to look at some of the ways we might attempt to understand someone and their lived experiences. Here, I found myself looking at old memories from different perspectives, in a sense both a renewal and a resurgence.
