Have I told you about how we first met?
My grandma used to tell me a story from when I was much too young to remember. She picked me up from the grass while I tried to fight back. She crossed what was my fear with bare feet, from the grass and buried across the sand, the hidden savage pincers of white insects amidst a shore of opaque glass. She held me by the arms as I reached and tried to cling to her and above the water, she let go. I cried.
In the details kept in her 86-year-old chest, I am told of the ocean; of you...
I was 9. I swam only as far as to where I could stand. Tumbling on the edge of breaking foam, my body felt invincible—reveled in the roiling high-tide of seashell fragments folding itself between hair and scalp. My mother watched from behind the waterline as I played.
How I remembered, in the smallest beads of my memory, the earliest you. Against backgrounds of bruised red on blurred sky, those beautiful patterns coming to shore.
Now I am here, in the same way as one of your waves. No matter how far inland I would push, I would always return; to those scenes that hold me only in transience. I remember the pieces spent in your cradle, from this coastal cliff where I stand from. That I am no longer in your fractals, perhaps there is still some company in remembering the parts we played in each other’s yellowed scenes.
I don’t know then if this is a confession or a profession; for your sake or mine, but this is what I feel the need to tell you of.
It was on New Year’s Eve, about 2 years ago. On the edge of the city, at a roadside canal close to the rumble of trucks on highways heading outbound. A pile of sand stood beside the canal, dug up by metal claws from the bottom of the river. I sat there and sifted handfuls of that crushed rock through my fingers, counting the minutes to the fireworks.
Water and sand that made me think of you. Even if I was far, far from your eastern wind, from your fore-wash of bubbles steadied onto demarcations of wet sand following the crest of bygone waves. I was still close enough to find another rhythm to your touch. The false sounds of metal, rubber, and asphalt as it grew distant and away from your broken limestone and roiling saltwater. In that brief moment I moved on.
Don’t let my humanity poison you. I hold onto our memories like the sandcastles made above the reaches of your highest spring tide, but back then, when I felt my own estrangement, searched on that beach with no shells nor corals, I had to wonder if you minded any of it…
If you minded being the harbor to my little storms?
I’ve missed you. I’ve missed the glowing clouds of disparate beauty—your bioluminescent dance of red algae—that we shared on that holiday where I came home from abroad. When my body’s ebb and flow ticked to a clock below the horizon, and in my head were new words, new friends, and an old yearning lingering on new lands. That and all which you brought home with a single wave. Off the timber pylons, I hung my foot and saw you mirror the night sky, stars surfing your peaks and valleys, constellations born anew with every stroke of my digits against your surface. If there were venom and teeth hidden in your darkest waters, I still would have swum and stretched my body to float in your deepest beauty.
You have a way to make me forget my humanity. My anxiety. When there is the slither of words in my throat like a banded sea krait looking for prey to envenom; there you await, the threads of sunlight below the surface, inviting all things fading into blue. In my anger, I see your waves smashing to erode; the mist of white foam and spraying sea-salt refracting a long gaze into the horizon. All the words in my mind as I walk on the half dried rockpools: carved channels and jutting limpets, hidden sharp spines of rockfish and urchins—all those beached intentions and spiraled shells—that I see a way out from the ecosystem left on those vessels of left tides.
I speak to you, to let it all go.
Let me again, be your ship to sail cargoing memories of impermanence. Across the sea of emotions, that I might keep dry the drier visages of life.
I am here now, if you would have me.
I have stories to tell you, if you would lend me your depths and shallows…
