My love for the sea, I carry it with me
For the first few years of my twenties, I have felt a great need (but stronger), a pull (but stronger), an urgency to escape to the sea. The truest form of contentment I felt all last summer was the two weeks I spent waking up half a mile from the ocean. How can one not feel comfort when falling asleep to the sound of waves? But it’s stronger, this sense of amenity and satisfaction. I belong to the sea. But stronger. Does she belong to me?
These small moments have come to represent how I see myself, this kinship between me and the water. Her sequins sparkle with every current; she blows a breeze off the shore, flipping the pages of my salt stained book; her whitecaps rise and crash onto each other, a dance she has perfected. Her salt seeps into my sweater, into my braid, into my sunburned skin. It wasn’t until the salt washed away that I began to miss that love, that comfort. Perhaps I didn’t know I was in love until I felt so far away; perhaps she misses me too.
My heart lies in the dunes of Nauset and Saco Bay; plastic cups filled with white wine, the smell of the marsh, the kick of the canoe against the tide. There is no anxiety when sitting on the beach, we are all but another piping plover or smoothed stone. A part of me still resides on the shore, the other half must wait through the cold months and fall decay until our July reunion. I fell in love on the beach. The urgency (but stronger) tugs me closer; I want to sell all my things and pack up my swimsuits and cameras into my tiny car and run away to the hydrangeas and rose of Sharon’s and pink August skies and drink coffee and eat omelettes on the back porch without pants on. For now I’ll wait in my small apartment where the train shakes my bed. I feel nostalgic and homesick though I call these 4 walls my ‘home’.
When staying on the shore of Nauset. I never will feel a peace, a rest deep in my body until my feet are walking across the shore, listening only to the splash of my toes and the crash of the waves. What is it? This strong gravitational pull that leads me to the outer edges of the earth? The path between green and blue. The layers of sand and dirt and stone. Nature floods into every corner, pours into every cell in my body. The power of the natural world wants to keep me in it’s heart, but I can only stay for a few weeks.
5. I keep one foot out the door, a hand over my heart, and a toe dipped in the ocean. Perhaps I was not born until I danced with the sea.