Still Blue

I am sitting, finally, in front of the ocean again. In the past day or so I have had these thoughts:

You are just a woman in a hotel bathtub.
I need you to be present in the experience you are having.
My nervous system has not been calm since I left the beach.

Perhaps I’d forgotten that the sound of the waves is the soundtrack of my life. Perhaps I have been buried and hurried and harried, in things that must get done but do not matter all that much. Here I am reminded that there are birds that fly in patterns and cut through the blue. Here I am reminded of the blue. Someone told me recently that there is no definable space in the human brain where we store long term memory, that rather they have come to believe that the water we are made of stores it, hidden mysteriously in its frequencies. It has been a long time since someone made so much sense, or interested me this much. When he says this, I am sitting on my couch and there are dishes to wash, but I can feel my inner self come to life again.

A man that I have loved, a man that shaped me into who I am and gave me who I am, is very very sick now. When you love someone like that, you don’t stop loving them ever. That love lives in a little house inside your body that you are reminded of when life looks like this, when it gets taken down to the studs. I think about him constantly and how scared his wife must be, and selfishly grateful that I am not his wife, because the blast radius of this would kill me. I love him too much to think of what may happen. And of course, I am pressed to the edges of my own life and afraid of what I am not doing with it, how I am not present, and to what degree I am not living. Everything I say about this sounds trite. Perhaps because it is. I don’t know how to talk about something that scares me so much.

I am watching the horizon line because what else is there to do but wonder at the space where the sea and sky meet. Because it is still and always will be the most gorgeous thing I have ever seen and the two blues here mix together so you actually cannot tell exactly where one ends and the other begins. There is a melding. And from the corner of my eye I catch sight of a whale. All these years looking at the sea and I’ve never seen a whale until now. It is so brief you can almost convince yourself you didn’t see it at all. All these years later, and I’m still blue.