On Thinking About The Raft Before Finishing My Debut Book

Are we ever going to make it?

I do not like writing about my childhood. 

I don’t know why, it was a very beautiful and happy one. We lived near the sea. 

If you’ve swam ever in Long Island Sound you know the waves don’t get very big. In fact, there were hardly waves at all. But the water to me was fine, as fine as anything had ever been. It never got the type of cold that seemed to permeate everywhere else that made swimming nearly unbearable, and made the water almost unusable. Where, standing in the shallows you didn’t get up to your knee before the water numbed your feet to the point of pain, to the point that you couldn’t even feel the water anymore. 

Our sea was not like that. It was very generous, it liked us very much. So I always spent ample time there. My dad waking early to place our chairs, the whole of our family making a tiny crescent with which I had never been so happy and did not think I’d ever lose. That was what childhood was always like, at least for me. As an adult now it's hard to describe the reality I functioned in, the way home made me feel like there was nothing beyond its boundary. Some paradoxical infinite thing that happened in a finite space. Forever existed only in eastern Connecticut where we were. When summer arrived it almost never occurred to me that it would end nor did I wish it to. I wanted always to be so close to my parents the way only in summer you were.