Half Shells

We sat outside at an old wooden high-top table. It violently tilted whenever one of us leaned on our elbows, and the bowed splinters from years in the salt air snagged our knit sweaters. I had drained my glass of white wine by the time our oysters arrived. I felt anxious, vibrating out of my body as my thoughts spiraled. It was my first time eating oysters. Not his. He said as much as we were parking next to the dock, our tires crunching over littered shells. His ex loved eating them.

I had never been to the Pacific Northwest before we moved together. Each day, there was something new for me to experience. Ferries and fog horns. Mailbox moss. The sting from a blackberry bramble. A moment of warm sun during an endless drizzle. All things he’d known from before, when eating oysters with someone else.

We didn’t overthink the idea of moving to the graveyard of his previous relationship. Simply, I knew I had to see the place, past lives be damned. Yet, as soon as I toed the Pacific, we were haunted. Her ghost was always there: on our long drive down the coast, which they had seen from a rented convertible; at my favorite coffee shop, where he had drawn while she studied; in my wonder at how salty and sticky my skin felt, which he had already tasted on her lips.

Eating oysters was my idea. I felt ravenous for my coastal home; I wanted the sea in my belly. Yet my enthusiasm sank to icy depths after he mentioned her in the parking lot. I stammered the names of the oysters I wanted to try. Nerves are common for first-timers, the shuckers assured me. Though I declined the shallot and Tabasco sides, they insisted I take them, sweetly keen on helping me take the edge off.

Wine and worry filled my bloodstream, and I struggled to follow his instructions for eating oysters. He made a brazen joke about fingering, which surprisingly didn’t kill me. I plunged my finger to separate blob and shell and threw back a mouthful that was more texture than taste, a maritime apparition. It was divine—a shot of sea, a wave of minerality, and a small current of sweetness.

I loved eating oysters, but so did she, and so I didn’t know how to respond when he asked me how I was doing. I didn’t know how to explain that I felt like I was finally whole but splitting in two, that I felt like I had arrived home but walked into an occupied space.

Not long after we ate oysters, he suggested we meet up with his ex, because moving is a lonely, funny thing. I didn’t know if he was desperate for company or if the oysters reminded him of something. Either way, summoning her from the dead felt deranged to me. Her ghost was already lurking around enough. Ultimately, I never did meet her, and we decided to move again, because life is a lonely, funny thing. Before I could rust with the ferries or decay under a blanket of moss, we abandoned our brief lives by the sea and retreated inland.

Years later, I began hallucinating about an oasis of saltwater. I was landlocked and dried out after too long in the desert, parched from life on a dusty road that had dead-ended. I remembered what it felt like to have fog fall on me and moss hold me, how sea foam and forest loam smelled, how morels, hops, blueberries, waves, and love tasted.

I deeply yearned for place and past, but most of all, I craved oysters. I wanted to taste that simple sweetness and feel softness again. I wanted to slip back into the salt and sea. I wanted to become one of his briny ghosts and finally get my fill of those half-shells of home.