My eyes are closed.
I am laying beside this ocean, the big water, on old linen that lets the sand beneath crumble into the shape of my sinking body. The waves are only noise but they crash over me. Their rhythm has somehow reset the clock of my own breathing. My lungs are like wings, pumping. Slowly, everything has come together in synchronicity. Even my heart's beating has somehow been brought in line with the percussion.
One beat perpetuates another and it another (and it another ....et cetera)...
I feel what best approximates "peace." I have not known this sensation before (or have not believed it). In a variety of conversations spanning the past twenty years, I have said in sputtering frustration, "That is an idea invented by the church." Naysayer, I, have spat at the promise of heaven even when still a little drunk with my own utopian fantasies.
Peace--like love or truth or hope--sits idly by our messy lives while promising the ideal it can't deliver. Far from elevating us above the mire, these pretensions, weather well-intentioned or sourced in cultural manipulations, cannot but help to serve up shame in our failings to achieve--or even to honestly aspire to--their righteous nobility. Like everyone else, I go to elaborate lengths to justify my own brand of lassitude. Laying here, I call my laziness "peace"; I call my persistent concern with your opinions, my anxious need to know where you...I call my preoccupation with your person "love".
It is not summer, not even here, and I have stolen only a week to breathe less out of obligation, more out of desire, to experience my heart--in its cage--singing. And so, if necessary, I will believe my own lies. It is fall. My body feels this, like the aching of the trees, their creaking limbs; the wind insists on testing them. It carries everything back...
out to sea.
The organ of my skin has come alive here. Like the sensuous understanding of the snake in his ambulations, I feel gravity pull and tug at my bones. I feel the stretch of muscles underneath. This holiday has exposed something (again). Their are (and always have been) limitations to the body. But the mind cannot help itself; it perpetuates the notion of immortality. Time has become the tug-o-war between the expectations we will shatter and the memories we will invent.
My eyes are closed.
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