» Nonfiction

What Washes Up

Melina Papadopoulos

Lake Erie gives us all she can, and we take it—seagull feathers, shards of driftwood, shells that have long shattered and spilled their songs into the deep. She’s young for one that has given herself to so many shores, a glacier’s cathartic shaping and reshaping. Young for a body of water but old enough to carry years of abandon by land, by sky, and by her depths.

I walk alongside her with my father. Just yesterday, I went on a date gone right (right in that I got an enthusiastic text back). Today, with the lake’s offerings at our feet, my father warns me against strangers. I tell him I don’t want to give myself to them, I just want to know that I’m worthy of taking.

Far down the shore, we spot a fish with no eyes, its quiet organs exposed. That’s a sheepshead, my father says. I nod. I think I’m too old for this, to take his words and hold them tight like weighty stones. I’m thirty. I’m embarrassingly new to love that nobody owes me.

But I want to be worthy even of his love, one I was born into. So I listen. I listen to him cough when he has nothing left to say. I watch Lake Erie fall into the sky but return to us, again and again, with new refuse, wave by wave.