Ocean Eyes

If I could paint, I would have by now. But I can't. I can't even take pictures half of the time; or rather, I can't make a camera capture what I see. I can take a picture of what I'm looking at, but it doesn't grab...what I see. It's like how a loved one isn't the same when they're chatting with you across the table as they are in a casket. Somethings missing.

All I can do anymore is stare until whatever I want to capture is engraven somewhere in my retina, hopefully being converted to storage somewhere in my brain. Often I don't even know if I'm successful--if I forgot it I couldn't remember it to have known I failed at remembering it in the first place.

I could stand here for one run of 93 Million Miles and turn in to bed like I intended, but I'll forget these night caps; these white cresting waves folding out of a dark drifting sea that pans on until the world ends. The ocean seems conquerable in the daylight; that perhaps just beyond that far-see there's an island or the drop-off. It would be easy and pleasant to go out and see. It's in the dark that the depth becomes incongruent. There is no horizon, only the expanse of ocean wrapping up into the night sky that so fittingly mirrors its shade. It curls under the flat surface of the earth where the salt water swirls in space of eons, crashing and breaking across itself and the thousands of shipwrecked ruins that Earth's surface has written off and forgotten.

This person is not the same as the one I chatted with this afternoon. It has transformed into something else entirely. Gentle hands call me to come in, be enveloped, and stay forever. Archaic blackness swirls off to where the wild things are. Death and happiness and fortitude and loss all scream in the roar of salt water.

I want to know where she'll take me, for in this moment she is a woman, teeming with life yearning to better minor or take it for her own.

But I watch her from a distance, barred in by a deck and a leg-shattering fall from leaping and running to her, from meeting and capturing what my camera and pen cannot. And what my eyes barely retain.

I wonder why muses were ever given a humanoid form. The Greeks must not have monitored their sea by night.

She speaks in tongues and an aquatic sign, but for a moment, perhaps, she is clear to you, as an individual, dashing your heart's desire in the nettles of her wake.

She is wanting. She is inspiring. She is calling.

I pray I have cemented her enough for recollection. And worry lest she changes again.