The ocean doesn’t want me today / But I’ll be back tomorrow to play

And the stranglers will take me / Down deep in their brine

The mischievous braingels / Down into the endless blue wine

I’ll open my head and let out / All of my time

I’d love to go drowning / and to stay and to stay

But the ocean doesn’t want me today.

The Ocean by Tom Waits

The ocean is, and has always been, a familiar destination. The Atlantic, on occasion the Pacific or the Caribbean, and, once, the Tyrrhenian Sea exert a pull, I assume, all oceans and seas have. The vastness, unpredictability, and sense of coming home well up as soon as I can see the smoky horizon and taste the brine. It’s a sensation like no other. The ocean is the ocean, all the oceans be, and it’s a strange and remarkable blessing to draw that first breath along the shore as the sand hardens under bare feet.

The mountains too, draw me in. They do more so because they are closer to me both physically and emotionally than that deep “wine dark” grey-bleu. Here, in the shadow of the oldest mountains on the planet, there is a sense that one could walk in and never come out again. For some reason, I find that comforting. A person could take their leave and live in the dips and cracks of the Appalachians, a solitary life that the soft verde would give willingly and with few renouncements. There is a solitude, a hush. Even if there are other humans about, they understand that unspoken private repose. The shores are not that, unless of course you’re lucky to find a stretch that few others occupy.

The community beaches, popular beaches, are full of people, loud voices, and children playing. Folks are tucked up close, umbrellas and blankets and music playing at a volume that would designate the righteous removal of hearing aides should one be using such a device. Your personal space is most certainly not yours, at least until you walk up to the edge. Then it’s just you and an unyielding horizon that doesn’t care about you or anything else in the slightest.

There is freedom on that brink, the world at your back and the possibility of everything and nothing at your feet.

There were times these past years when I felt that endless possibility with un petit peu of the abyss winking ever so knowingly at me. That sensation held itself in the pores and cracks, deep in the marrow. I was a part of this world, but not of it. I understood it on a molecular level: not tangible, not discernable by taste or smell or touch. It was somewhere only accessed by rumination, dreams, or ether that murmured: “Psst. Bitch. Time to come in clutch or tap out.” Maybe, and more understandable, it was like the sensation of déja vu whereas I was here again, tethered only to the world, this world, but by a thread so thin it could only be felt when certain synapses were joined together for a brief second by a slip of cranial electricity. Maybe. It’s hard to quantify to anyone but myself, — and this not any sort of enlightenment mind you — is the experience of sonder. Those around me, every single person walking about, has a life as complex as mine, just organized differently. We are atoms arranged as we are and with life experiences too. We are energy, the same substance as the oceans and the mountains. We are them and they are us, just arranged differently. Each and every single thing, made of energy and atoms and molecules; the stuff of stars. When all of my time threads through and out, returning to the energy from which it came, I will try to remember being here this time, in this universe, with this spectacular reciprocal spirit. All the gifts I was given and those who claimed me as their own. All the love and kindness and joy.

Perhaps I’ll be back someday, as a drop in the ocean, or a new fern on the slope, or a cat asleep on the stoop and I’ll remember to play and to play.