The ferry is getting worse, worse than it was even last year, when it seemed to be about as bad as it could get, and so the sailing for which I arrived on time turned out to be more than an hour behind schedule. That meant more than an hour I had to spend waiting in the sun.
When I was younger, I thought that the hottest part of the day, the one to avoid, was noon. That's why I was often asleep. At least, that's what I told myself. But during the heat dome two years ago, I actually googled it for the first time. The hottest part of the day is three or four, when the sun is still high in the sky, and the ground has had enough hours baking to emanate its own heat. I arrived for the ill-fated ferry at 2:50, and down at the cove, there was no shade to speak of.
Most of the memories where I feel like myself are sunlit. Then there was a transitional period: only going out in the sun with other people; only going out on my bike, too fast for anyone to see me or catch me. Then I became nocturnal. I never appeared in photographs. It made sense, this vampiric existence, with the way I thought of myself: a parasite drawing the life from others; a doomed, satanic creature of the night, hateful to all those who walked in the daytime.
In 2020, while the sun shone in the forest outside, I stayed in my room, the shades drawn, playing Oblivion for hours. Once, in the game, I went to sleep and woke up a vampire. (I realized, suddenly, why all the NPCs had been so mean to me for the last few hours.) I was out in the middle of nowhere, too far away from everything to complete the vampire cure quest, too far even to find someone whose blood I could drink. Every time I tried to go anywhere, I died the second a ray of sunlight poked over the horizon. And I hadn't saved recently. For around an hour, I tried to find a workaround. I died dozens of times. It was always the same, no matter where I went. The light flashed; my skin burned. There was no choice but to go back to my last save, losing hours and hours of progress — back to a version of my character I thought I had left behind.
At the dock cafe, people I knew in high school made my iced Americano. If they recognized me, they didn't let on.
The lagoon was quieter than I thought, and as I approached, my drink already almost gone, I saw a splashing by the rocks. There were two mergansers, bathing and preening, jumping in and out of the water. I had never had a chance to see one so close to me before, let alone two.
The first time I tried going to the beach again, when I was 16, I burned. I had never gotten a sunburn before, not in all my childhood hours scampering on the rocks and in the water all day. Now, though, after emerging from the darkness, my skin went deep red. It hurt like nothing I'd experienced before. The pain kept me up at night, and the skin blistered and peeled After that, I wore long sleeves. I slept even later. The sunlit world was not for me.
It took until last summer for me to really live in the sun again. But there are fragments, here and there. An afternoon in May eight years ago. I had just started dating my partner. We were gay teenagers; we couldn't see each other indoors. So we sat on the beach, watching the gleaming waves.
And then, not far from shore, we spotted something, a strange duck with a fuzzy red head. On its back, perfectly placed, were two little round ducklings. I see it so clearly, still, clearer than almost anything else. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it. They seemed to be there only for us, only in that moment. They sailed along, farther and farther out to sea, before they turned back toward the river.
“I think they're grebes,” I said, some long-buried knowledge from my forgotten bird books resurfacing. I was surprised by myself. I hadn't realized I knew anything about birds.
When I got home, I looked it up, and I was wrong. They were mergansers. And now that I know about birds again, I know even more how magical that bright vision was.
I knew, as I watched the mergansers in the lagoon, how lucky I was. To be there, at that moment, in the sun and the heat, with all the other life in the world. I carry sunscreen in my bag now, the way my mom did for me when I was small. When I look at my reflection, I see myself. The hair, the shape of the jaw, the smile, like it was back then. The cure for vampirism, it turned out, was simple: go back.
It seemed like just a few minutes had passed, but when I turned away from the lagoon, I saw the ferry coming from across the sound. It was time to go home.