"A Desolate Shore"

At the time, I didn’t even think about those small mundane things you did.  Everything became a part of the normalcy of simply being together.  I wasn’t taking anything for granted, but the comfort of your assumed presence didn’t impart any realized significance to those actions.  But then came the storm, every bit as unexpected and ferocious and unmerciful as a torrent of nature’s fury out on the open sea.  Suddenly, the vessel was smashed and everything along with it and I am now a shipwreck, my soul is interminably waiting on some uncharted, god-forsaken shore, drowning in loneliness and despair.  Every now and then, however, the tide washes up onto the beach, like some random piece of flotsam that has been tossed about upon the cruel, violent sea, a vestige of that which was once us, a shard of memory that flickers like a piece of metal in the sand.  And now, in your absence, as I look upon this broken reminder of our past, I slowly piece together that particular moment in time, and I become transfixed in that warm, living memory.  Suddenly, the mundane isn’t so commonplace-the way you looked with your back to me as you picked up and considered a copy of Wuthering Heights, your body slightly arched sideways as you rested your weight on your left leg, slowly swaying in place; the way the parking lot lights reflected off your hair that hazy August evening as we left the bookstore, your hand in mine, our fingers gently interlocked (how I yearn for the feel of your skin just once more!), and the way your lips tasted, a mixture of your sweet berry lipstick and a bead of sweat that must have formed on your upper lip as we stepped from the comfort of the cool interior into the oppressive, muggy blackness.  In that flood of remembrance, I am paralyzed by its tender, beckoning nostalgia, and though I want to throw this relic of the past far from me, I covet its bittersweet pain. I want to open the wounds again and let myself bleed freely as I stand and become lost in you all over again. How ironic is it that emptiness should focuses these images into sharper resolution?  But how did these memories survive the ice-cold, indifferent sea?  What buoyed them up and prevented them from being irrevocably swallowed up and digested within their depths?  Why was I given a taste of something so sweet, enticing, and delicious only to be denied a seat at the table from which to dine?  Like the trail of smoke that marks an airplane’s flight through the heavens, so too do these myriad questions run through my mind in the wake of these memories.   Tomorrow I will go down to the shore and see what else the capricious sea will give up to me, what other broken piece of you will wash up in the frothy breakers…JY