To the Waters and the Wild

          

Some eyes tell stories, stories of past loves, stories of loneliness, stories of dreams. Though try as I might, his eyes seemed so unreadable. I couldn't fathom what lurked behind them. Why wouldn't he tell me what he was feeling? How long had this invisible wall been between us? Was I simply too caught up in his smile to notice the faint line of stone and the sharp barbed wire crown? 

The scene around us was all gold and lavender with silver tides. A blending of the three worlds, where earth met the sky and sky met the sea. I felt so small in the ocean's powerful ebb and flow, so colorless next to the rose colored windows in the clouds, so lost walking over the silvery misleading sands. Were they deep or was it only a trick of the dimming light? Was he only a trick of the dimming light? 

I wondered if he was even real. Was he simply a figment of my imagination? Or perhaps a ghost of a lonely sailor haunting the seashore? Or maybe just a delusion made in all of my devastating loneliness. I knew that loneliness could make people do and think impossible things, loneliness was like the vastness of the sea, so dark and big and cold.

I took another step farther away from him and tried to find a way in my thoughts, only he was there now. In them, I mean. Imbedded in the words floating around in my head. Somehow he made the world inside feel too terribly lonely, it was as though he was calling me, like the pied piper, calling me outside of my shell. The shell I had been hiding in far too long. I looked to the sky, the sky and it's windows of rose hues, and then to the horizon where it met the sea. A flock of seafaring birds floated by and I wondered what they saw from their vantage point up in the billowy clouds. 

All that the birds saw from high up above were two dots on the expanding shore. One was an impossibly small girl and the other an impossibly small boy. No invisible walls or empty eyes, just specks on the beach and waves on the sands.