Stranger on the Shore

There's a dream that always comes to me because my home was once an island. So whenever I had to go into the city, of course I had to catch the ferry. In this dream I'm racing to the ferry dock just as the small steamer sounds its whistle and pulls away in a cloud of smoke. What could my subconscious be trying to tell me? What might a psychological analysis, in the vein of Freud or Jung, reveal? Perhaps I had no sense of security and feared missing everything. Yet what could I have possibly missed? There would be another ferry, and another, and besides, why was I in such a hurry? Where was I going?

The dream is so vivid, as vivid as watching a movie shrunken down, with the corner of the screen crushed into the sea by the immensity of the sky and mountains. In the background, the sky and waves dissolve together, and in the foreground is the empty dock, the ferry puttering off, its path aslant on the waves until it grows fainter and fainter. I see my own figure still standing on that dock, not a soul for miles, only a girl and her skinny shadow. Just as in a film, I hear the strains of Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore" in the background, the words welling up within me: "Here I stand / Watching the tide go out / So all alone and blue / Just dreaming dreams of you." 

I was a solitary child. After school, I tucked myself away in some corner of the schoolyard, under the spreading branches of the shadow tree and the buzzing cicadas, to plunge into War and Peace, Les Misérables, Outlaws of the Marsh, or The Journey to the West, so lost in the story that I didn't feel the day fly past until my grandmother called me for dinner. I came back out of the story, where the day had felt so long. Because of my reading, I found everyone's chatter more idiotic, the island more narrow-minded, and I couldn't wait to grow up, to escape and see the world beyond the island with the eyes of an eagle.

On the island, dozens of girls my own age shared the same fates. All of them couldn't wait to grow up and marry and have children, then to stay home with the little ones and the housework, taking on some piecework to bring in something extra, playing mah-jong in the spare hours and going to mass. It's a life that is over before it's begun. I told myself, I don't want that kind of life. That will not be my future. One day I will leave to find it. I'm still young, with things to do and places to go.

Now, all I've ever desired, I have. All the cities I wanted to see, I've seen. I've settled in a small North American city doing the work I was meant to do. My free hours are filled with reading, painting, writing, listening to music, watching movies, doing yoga, travelling, living out the dream life of my childhood I should appreciate it, and yet...

The last time I returned to the island, that dock was no longer used. On the other end of the island, there's a new terminal, where you can wait inside, out of the sun and the rain. But there's no longer the view of mountainous islands or the feel of the soft sea breezes. I mingle among the waiting crowd, but there's not a single face I recognize. In fact, I find I have returned to the same position I was in before. It feels as though I've never left, and yet I can't name anyone here. In this island where I born, I'm now the stranger... a mere passerby. 

—Brick Magazine, winter 2019