During spring break, we visited my grandmother in Mexico for Passover. I’m not a party person, and it feels almost worse at family reunions. Everybody loves you until you turn 13, and I have gone thoroughly past 13. But the Seder was at a friend of my grandmother’s house, which was right next to the sea. So, when it was earlier, I ditched the loud adult conversations and ran down to the beach. At first, I just stood on one good leg and watched the waves crash on the land. Dragging my feet through the sand, picking some rocks up and throwing them in the water, thinking it was some kind of food to the waves. Then I turned to my left, and saw a big lump on the ground. It looked like a rock. Curious, I walked over, only to see that it was definitely not a rock. It was a dead sea creature. A fat one, furless and rotting. It had been dead for a few days, when I walked around there I was treated to a good look at its picked apart face.
Obviously, no one wants to look at a dead animal for too long. So I ran back to the stairs, reached for the crack between door and door hinges. The thing was stuck.
“Hey,” I yelled, looking up at the balcony, “The door’s stuck! Can someone open it?!”
No one heard me. And that door wasn’t opened until one of the guests at the Seder came out and asked me if I wanted to leave the beach.
Throughout the Seder itself, I couldn’t stop thinking about the creature. When I asked the guy who brought me up, he said it was a sea lion. Then new questions came: how did no one notice the dead sea lion in the middle of the sand? It had clearly been dead for a while, and people were walking on that beach.
During dinner, my memory of it resurfaced and I walked out to the balcony. I could see the sea lion from there. Leaning over the balcony, my attention focused on it. The light from a nearby house illuminated the ground along with the corpse, almost like the light of heaven cascading from the clouds. With the way the shadows fell, it looked like a perfectly circular pool of blood was right under the body of the sea lion. From the ocean, waves flowed in, the tide was starting to get higher. At my spot, I hoped, prayed that those waves would pull the sea lion down in the current, back home. Home to the cold silence and comfort of water, laid to rest.
But that didn’t happen. No, the waves touched the sea lion, but it didn’t bring it into the ocean. Rather sometimes rose up to toss its body around cruelly, dragging it to lay down straight or sideways or whichever way it chose.
Man, the whole thing hurt to watch. I just kept waiting whenever the water rose up, waiting for when it would finally happen. But it never did. The hurt made me think a bit. The beam of light on the corpse, no one saw it, birds came down to pick at the remains.
And not even the waves wanted the sea lion back.
The train of thought was quickly interrupted by the barking of a dog, causing me to jolt up. One of the two who lived at the house was right up at the sliding door, yipping and yapping away. I thought someone was yelling at me.
When I came inside, all the adults were talking.
“… Because that’s the goal,” one of the guests said, “It’s not in their best interest to have Palestinians safe.”
“Yeah.” Someone agreed.
My dad turned to me as I shuffled to my seat, sitting down in my chair, smaller and less grand than any other.
“We’re talking about Hamas.” My dad explained.
Yes. The best topic told at any Jewish dinner.
“I’m just looking for some clarification,” the host added on, “Because it used to be ‘Oh fuck them! Fuck them!’ But now with all the pro-Palestine stuff and the videos, I don’t know what to think anymore.”
I was going to say something. But frankly, no one would want to hear it.