The Best American Essays 2015 Read Online Free Page A

hissed?
    Â 
    Manhattan hisses—with savagery. It’s an island of bodies while other islands steam with the hissing of volcanoes—volcanoes that dare you to forget that some islands came into being because of volcanic eruptions or tectonic shifts. But no matter how islands like Barbados and Trinidad, say, came to be formed, you can feel them percolating beneath your feet as you walk to market, or up to the graveyard, or on your way to meet a lover. They bubble with impermanence. The whole thing might sink in a minute just as volcanoes erupt in a minute, and it’s that potential impermanence, I think, that contributes to an island’s lonely feel, even in Manhattan, where you have to fight to be alone even if you’re lonely.
    Standing at the edge of the bay, which is a body of water that’s connected to an ocean or a sea, and formed by an inlet of land—standing by the edge of the bay for the first time, I didn’t want to think about all I’d left behind in Manhattan, which is to say I didn’t want to think about my life without my true friend, he whom I love like no other and who introduced me to that northern bay in the first place. To think about my life in the city would be like creating an island that excluded him—an island composed of streets that don’t lead to the edge of a bay but end in rivers, and not to get all Langston Hughes about it, but my whole life I have known rivers but not bays, and not love, not like this. My friend’s love can feel like the best part of islands and its various intensities, its occasional lushness and aridity, colors that hurt your eyes and skin, smells—peppers, onions, frangipani—that can hurt your skin, too, while shattering any idea you might have had about your own originality: the smells and colors on certain islands in the Caribbean, say, are you and you are the smells and colors because for the most part island life is small and intense and no one who lives there or spends any time in that part of the world escapes being absorbed in the din of its colors, the orchestra of its smells, the horizon line where sea and sky meet and go on and on, seemingly forever.
    I want to go on with my friend forever, not least because he wants to know who I am; he wants to see me, and that includes knowing something about my past, and that past includes, of course, my first experiences on islands. He wants to connect my past of water and tectonic shifts with his island, and the bay. One memory: my younger brother and I were sent to visit our mother’s enormous family in 1970 or 1971, when we were around ten and eight, respectively. Being sent away on summer holiday meant leaving behind our social lives in Brooklyn, where we grew up, and where pebbles were embedded in concrete and streetlights relieved the darkness and one would see and smell, on summer nights, acrid children in striped T-shirts, musty earth in vacant lots, rusting car parts in vacant lots, older children sitting in those non-automotive cars smoking cigarettes and pinching the small nipples on small-tittied girls whose long legs in their Bermuda shorts or denim cutoffs were like osprey legs in that they would have trod delicately through bay water, had there been any as lapidary as the bay water edging toward my feet moments before I recalled visiting Barbados as a child, which was not the great adventure some parents, like my own, expect their children to have, especially if those parents are interested in geography and are familiar with the terrain they are sending their children off to see, partially in the hope that their past experience will make their children, whom they cannot see, behave in a way that is responsible to the landscape that the parents themselves used to have their wildest dreams of escape on, but won’t admit to, needing to believe in the fiction of family, of geography, in order to maintain some sense of who they are. The mind unfamiliar