It is as if life, a wave, tide, movement, has headed away – back out in the direction of Living – as if it was a signboard or mode of transport or maybe both – Living as its destination, or the name of its sleek water-crossing boat, its fast ferry, skimming the surface like that Adriatic boat from long ago, jumping from one wave-tip to the next, like an ecstatic frog.
But you are not in the boat now, you are not heading out to sea or held in life’s current, you feel like some flotsam left behind, by tide and flow and ocean waves, left behind, abandoned, to deal with the unmoving sand and only slightly swaying seaweed, as best you can, which is to say, with nothing at all. Unless the vast emptiness of abandonment counts for something. It is not what you would choose. Except that, in some way, you have chosen. As if life had offered an endless flow, a succession of absorbing places but you were not warned that it would all stop one day and you would be left on the last island outpost, some beach-like-any-other, without time to make the final, definitive choice. It just all stopped, while you thought it would go on and you had plenty more choices to make, places to visit – before the final one had to be made.
Flotsam on a beach, when you always thought there would be a boat prepared to take you on to somewhere else, to set sail with you.
You’d been left behind, abandoned, while the others – or Life itself, hard to know the exact nature of this living-ness that had gone off without you, you knew by this feeling of absence, of not being with-you, that you have a diminished sense of movement, of current, of destination. Just sand – washed over and over, but not carried away, not taken out to sea.
With such a feeling – the logical thing surely – is to visit the sea. Walk in sand, by shores, see what is there on the beach – if there is anything there, that resembles you.
There is sunlight and the way it trickles onto the surface and changes as the surface shifts and turns and undulates. The waves, underneath water surface like an uncoiling rippling snake reminding you that waves only shift the water on, push it relentlessly ashore and the water sighs as it returns, as it must, to the wholeness of sea – or ocean.
Probably you think, you would like to live the way you did when you took that boat across the Adriatic, the frog-boat, probably it was not just that place – though you loved it with a heart thrown wide open – it was the sense of movement, of having shifted from one place to another, then another, and the sense of possibilities, yes, that was it, horizons unfolding in front of you as if you had every right to move and to keep moving and to love wherever you were going.
And there are shells too, perfect, unbroken shells, thick white and bluish shells lying on the beach. You pick them up and pocket them because of their perfection and their beauty. And still, the sun shines and the cover of the water ripples as the force beneath it moves it like a restless dancing being under the blanket of the sea.
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