"A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea."

Waiting for Nina

The Beginning of the End

So this is it, old friend.
For half of my life, we have gone through this together.
Intimately interwoven and integral in life,
With no discernible separation from me to you,
no divided space between to move.
I let myself be led nowhere.
Floating between the waves of the sea,
Only to rise and fall on the whims of an inconstant ocean.
The open sea and sky daunting in their infinitude, gape like open mouths of possibility ,
too vast to focus on any one detail.
I surrendered to your persuasion and it intoxicated me, lulling me in
to keep floating.
The drift itself is a course, intended or not, laying out before me, of your own accord.
When you leave, I start to tread and swim, in stronger more motivated strokes,
Until I find you again, over the crest of another wave.
When you take my hand, that familiar bottomless feeling of the float kicks in again.
As my stride slows, and my strokes disintegrate to drifting,
the buoyancy of non-direction sinks back into me.
In order to break the embrace, I must pull away. I can not float out of the current, the way I floated in.
More like a rip tide, I realize so far from shore,
I have been absorbed into your insistent force as the sea's propulsion pulls me in the wrong direction.
As I prepare to struggle away from your numbing grasp, I, for the last time,
fill my lungs with nothing but air, and let my arms hover at my sides.
I feel the crest of a wave as it passes under me, taking me closer to the big sky,
and temporarily filling me with its swell.
And for one last time, I let myself evaporate into the tugging in my stomach,
of the ocean sinking beneath me, pulling me down and enveloping me on all sides.
As the crest begins to build again, I start to kick and pull away.
As I loosen the fingers enclosed around my mind, and pull out of the drifting abyss,
my arms and legs immediately feel foreign and fragile,
until the rhythm of my own depth begins to guide me along.
With every stroke and kick, my resolve wakes up and powers me forward,
until again I see the vast ocean and the deep blue sky,
And just in between the two is the horizontal divide of hope.

At home, as a tourist

by any other name . . .