Sea

                The waves roll in, the waves roll out. A gull cries in the distance, but it’s too dark to see it. Maybe it’s hidden in the shadows, somewhere just out of sight, calling out to the moon past the corner of your eye. Natural as the flow of breath, the water rises with a rush and falls back with a sigh, frothing out and leaving traces of foam in the moonlight.

                You try not to think. You try not to try not to think. Somehow the moment doesn’t seem quite real—they never seem entirely real. Standing there in the damp sand, gritty beneath your toes, you make your own little sigh to match the ocean’s great one. You think you ought to be amazed at the sight, the grace and splendor of the sublime ocean, but all you can think of is that you should have worn your sandals because the sand’s going to be caked on your feet by the time you get back. So you try not to think, or at least to think about the sea, something nice, something pretty, something other than that constant gnawing black hole thought that tells you you’re thinking about the wrong thing and should think of something else. Oh God, if only…

                If only what? If only you could finally find out “If only what?”! If only you could get the right angle on yourself, see yourself from the perfect perspective, maybe you’d manage to see the sea and not get lost in the sighs. But that can’t be it, because if you’re looking at yourself you’re not looking at the sea… the sea can’t be a mirror, can it?

                No, this is wrong, it’s all wrong! Just look at the sea, will you, why won’t you look at the sea? You just open your eyes and see the waves moving in, shining all in light and dark like the words of a message you could make out if you could just tune into the right frequency. Surely this is the same sea as yesterday. Surely you are the same you as yesterday. It spoke then; why won’t it speak today?

                They say we came from the sea, millions, maybe billions of years ago. We were simpler then, not so anxious, not so afraid of pain or death. We ate when we were hungry and we slept when we were tired. We weren’t so clever then, and in those days we’d never have thought to put up obstacles in our own way. We left the sea without a thought, or we casually said to ourselves, “Whew, is it good to be out of there! Too salty, for one, and for another thing it just makes me so seasick!” Did any of us ever think we might someday miss the sea?

                But look at these waves! Licking at your toes already, and with the breeze picking up like this it looks like a storm might be on the way. It might be best to head inside. But just see how the peaks of the waves reflect the moon, the way they glisten with her light. She’s passed behind a cloud, but as you watch you know very well where the light comes from… The waves rush in, piling one on top of the other and slipping out, leaving the sand to glisten momentarily before the next wave’s appearance. Just like the sea. It rises up towards you, at times terrifying in its eagerness, yet just as quickly it shrinks back into itself. In a way it’s like the spider, which (as they always say) is more afraid of you than you are of it.

                What is this ocean? What is this formless mass of fluid that can’t decide whether to reach out or to collapse into itself? What’s in those depths, after all?

                The gull cries out again. You still can’t see it, but the sound snaps you out of your absorption and back into yourself. One by one, raindrops kiss the sand. You turn to walk home, and your hair is damp by the time you get there. When you turn back, you smile to see that the moon’s come out from behind her cloud.