The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,85

point. It’s over. Let’s just go home.”

Wheeling the car around, he reached over and ruffled my hair, like I was a little kid. I swatted him away half-heartedly. He squeezed my jaw, trying to make me smile.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s not so bad. You’re gonna be all right.”

And even though we hadn’t found what I was looking for in Jarrettsville, the farther we drove away from it, the more I felt I was leaving something behind. Even if I could have talked to Gregory about spiritual things, I wouldn’t have opened up to him that day. What I was leaving wasn’t just my childhood or my happy memories of the departed Miss Hannah. I was pulling away from the closest moment I’d ever had to a physical experience of the divine.

When you get older, when your memory starts to slip, you look back and realize that all the years you spent in anticipation were in fact your best years. While you were looking forward to better things, they were already the best, and from now on life would only go downhill. That’s how I felt at that moment.

Giving up on the search meant surrendering the most profound intimacy I’d ever known in my nineteen years of existence.

From here on out, I believed, I could only grow farther away.

I must have nodded off on the beach.

When I open my eyes, I’m staring at the sky through a bald spot in the grass roof, a gap that wasn’t there when we arrived. Holly’s chair beside me is empty. One of her magazines lies facedown on the sand, anchored by the Diet Coke bottle. Her fringed wrap is coiled around one of the chair legs. She must have gone back up to the house—but no, sitting up on my elbow, I see her down by the water, kicking the waves with child-like abandon.

“You finally caught the bug,” I mutter aloud.

The dark clouds loom closer, but the sky above burns especially bright in compensation: a pure, clear blue. I shed my sunglasses, taking in the stretch of hot white sand. I feel comfortably lethargic.

Sinking down, I gaze at the sky through the gap in the grass hut’s roof. Around the edges, a few stray blades shimmer in the breeze. As I watch, a bird flashes past, too quick for me to make out anything but the blur of a wing. Every strong gust seems to push the gap a little wider, exposing another inch or two of sky. It’s the movement that keeps my attention, the intermittent expansion. Otherwise I would have looked away already.

Instead, I keep looking. My attention shifts from the edge of the hole to its center, to the impossibly clear blueness of the sky. It’s not natural to really look at something. The urge to glance away is hard to resist. If you discipline yourself, though, if you relax into the gaze, things that ordinarily wouldn’t hold your interest for more than a second can reveal extraordinary depth.

I lie there, feeling the wind blow the hem of my Ravens T-shirt wide, feeling the dry sand on the soles of my feet flake away, more aware of myself, of my body, of the fact of my embodiment (I don’t know how else to say it) than I have ever been. The blue sky is textureless, infinite, throbbing in the familiar way of my youth. I lie before it the way Miss Hannah sprawled on the wood pew, submitting to the vision.

The longer I look, the nearer the sky is. And it changes on me, losing its innocent hue, darkening and deepening. Sometimes it appears so abstract—unmediated color—and then a bird will streak past or a bit of gray cloud will pass along the edges, shocking me into the realization that the sky is much farther away than I fancy.

Then the cloud is gone and I’m floating again.

Sometimes the sky looks liquid too, and I imagine that instead of looking up I’m gazing down into a bottomless, swirling sea of bluish-purple black, and the only thing preventing me from falling is a kind of reverse gravity that pins me to the roof of the world.

You’re crazy, you know that? I tell myself.

And though I don’t speak the words out loud, I hear them as if I had. As if I’d whispered into my own ear. Apart from my voice, there is nothing but silence: no wind, no wave, no sound of Holly on the beach. No drums beating or crowds howling,