The Best American Essays 2015 Read Online Free

anything I saw. There was a bit of moon in the night sky. It killed me. That sky’s largeness and generosity reminded me of how pitiful I can feel on islands, where one’s ideas about the place amount to so much sentimental or ideological bullshit next to shoeless island dwellers with rust-colored heels tramping through pig shit putting pigs to bed, or other island dwellers sitting, legs spread, on a concrete step leading to a little tin-roofed house, a house with one or two rooms and black people coupling and talking their coupling in a bedroom in that house, maybe under a window crammed with stars. I like it here. I stay on this island on weekends, when I visit a friend who lives here, a friend I love like no other. It’s far north of the island my family came from originally, which is smaller, mean, and turned in on itself, like an evil-smelling root. Looking down at the black wavelets in the black night bay—the patterns were visible to me because of that piece of moon—I could not help but think of lines—lines made in nature, and then lines on a canvas or in a drawing, and how those lines were not really very different from lines of writing brought together to describe sensations such as the love I feel on this island with its bay, and my friend, whom I love like no other.
    Earlier in the day, my friend and I came down to the bay with a picnic. After a while, my companion rolled his trouser cuffs up; he walked to the water’s edge and then put his feet in the water. I did not join him. In my mind’s eye I could see his flat, skeletal feet in clear bay water and suddenly I felt such sadness: he could walk away from me at any moment, walk across the water like Jesus or Robinson Crusoe and set up shop on another island, with some other island dweller. Love can make you feel as though you’re shipwrecked; love can make you feel as lonely as an island. Watching my friend standing in the bay water, I wanted to call out to him: Come back! Come back! But he had not left. And yet I feared he would, leaving me behind with all that love and potential and bay water.
    The ripples, not waves, made by the turn of the water near my feet at the edge of the night bay sounded like a dog’s tongue lapping in a bowl half-filled with water, or perhaps the waves lapping sounded like two human tongues meeting inside mouths joined together less out of comfort than boredom, saying, We might as well, what else is there for us on this island but the tedium of being ourselves alone, our jawbones snap into place as we stretch our mouths open, not to accept one another but to accept the hope that can sometimes happen between two people sitting on a bed in a house on an island, let’s call it Barbados, in 1970 or 1971, years before I stood at the wide-open mouth of the bay.
    I am not predisposed to the tenets of geography. East and west remain, for me, abstractions that my mind and body cannot make real, since east and west do not relate to the experience of where I am standing in my mind just now, which is near a bay on another island looking into water as if I have a right to it; Marianne Moore said that. In any case, I don’t have a right to anything, certainly not an island, which cannot be owned, its citizens can only lease it. Islands belong to themselves. In any case. But I cleave to knowing my friend’s island as a way of protecting myself against the memory of other islands I had no choice but to visit at one time or another, like Barbados, which has bays, too. When I am not standing at the edge of the bay on this northern island, I live on another island—Manhattan. Unlike other islands, Manhattan is not a cloud dump. That’s how Elizabeth Bishop described Crusoe’s Caribbean island—as a “sort of cloud dump”—in her brilliant 1971 poem “Crusoe in England.” She goes on:
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Was that why it rained so much?
And why sometimes the whole place