My Inevitable Letdown

"It's empty." He said as we stood shoulder to shoulder. I watched with eyes cast down, contemplating all the hype we give these moments, all the expectations that ultimately end in ruin.

When has reality mirrored my mind? When has the outcome exceeded my expectations and dreams? When have these things gone right?

I slowly came to a squat and brushed my fingertips against the jagged wood of the chest. I felt him sink beside me.

"I guess that means we fill it."

He took my hand and pulled me up, the warmth of our touch lost in the wind, my eyes somehow seeing what they've always seen, forced now, by my inevitable letdown, to take the sight for fact. We gathered up our things.

I helped him fill the box, did my best to contribute, but it boiled down to the fact that he had the most to add. He brought the nic-naks and souvenirs we could bury for decades; the things we want to remember but will come to forget. I hid the few I wanted, the things I couldn't bury, the things I need to keep though they haunt me with their memories and gather dust before my eyes. I slipped them in my bag as he hunched over, arranging the box.

He looked up at me and smiled.

I received it emptily, finding a disconnect with each article we piled in the box; drained of all empathy in the act of packing it away. He smile faltered for a moment. He stood.

"Would you say we're done? It's full."

I touched my bag lightly with my foot, an affirmation it was real. "I can't imagine what else we have to bury."

He smiled with heart and clamped the chest shut. "Let's throw it in the sea."

I let him take it, trailing behind, a melancholy seeping in with each step, the bag on my shoulder dragging me down and stopping my steps. He walked to the edge and heaved it over, letting go before I was near enough to watch it plummet and crash to a watery grave. He turned as I reached him, and smiled with ease.

I wonder who will find it. I wonder who will know. I wonder if the box will beat, if it will thump a rhythm of the lives contained from its place at the ocean floor, or creep its way underground to be dug up by a boy with a bike.

I turn to find him gone; I stand alone at the edge of the sea, knowing it won't be the same. The box is full but my soul is empty, save the pangs the weigh my purse. It's time to find another chest, to invest in another container and hope and pray there's something more within than air.

I've taken too much of me to fill more dead space. I've taken too much of me to have any to spare.

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.