*I wrote this a few years ago and it reminds me of why I love being on the water. So here’s to the last dregs of winter, and being in a land locked state.*
And then there are days where you find your self running, though the snow, aching for the water, it might be after all, the only home you have every really known. So you bound down the stairs, unsure if they are even still there under the drifts and duck under the boughs that are hung heavy with ice. The skyline is the same one that you have seen hundreds of times and the colors on the horizon are the same, but its cold, and bitter, and the dock that hangs half on the surface and half in the depths of the water looks less and less like a refreshment and more and more like a failing abandonment, as if the water was so cold that it just could hold on any longer.
Just months ago you were walking here, on the sand bars, and dancing with the water swirling around your ankles, and you were happy. But now the wind threatens to tear the hat from your head and the last few flakes from the storm sting your face. You can’t help but imagine that you are one of those men whose stories you have so often tried to make your own. Those men stranded on the other side of the world, wrapped in fur and wondering if the ice will ever melt, if your ship will survive, and why you even thought to come to such a winter desert in the first place. You keep your eyes from the houses and focus on the water, the ice covered raft, because for just 5 more minutes you want to pretend that they aren’t options, that there is nothing else to think about but living, and staying warm and seeing something that no one else can see for you or could even try to describe to you in words. Just 5 more minutes like this, and you can be whole again? Re-focused? Stronger? Or maybe just content with going back to looking out at this world from behind a window.
You wait until the sun is gone, until the only ones that could possibly see you trying desperately to slip into the past would only be able to see the shadows of your daring escape in the moonlight. You reach the tidal flat and walk out to the iced raft and climb the ladder. You’re not exactly sure what you are thinking. Maybe that by standing there you can get some sense of what it means to be out there, cold, and not really sure what is coming and what is going.
It doesn’t take long to remind you why you always end up here, why this is always the place that you run when you need to clear your head or just get unwound. The water will always be your first love. The wind in your hair will forever be your muse. Even in the middle of a New England December you would rather be here than anywhere else. Everything is white and perfect and the water is quiet and soothing. As you stand there, staring off into the delta you can’t help but notice that you must look remarkably like the waving girl in Savannah; the girl who stood at the light house with the wind in her hair and her skirts waving goodbye to her sailor who may never return. It’s dark, and the moon is on the water, and the wind has blown the stray strands of hair across your face. Your long red skirt painted with the remains of snow and slowly shaking them off as the wind whips it away from your ankles. The scene is exactly the same, the only difference is that no one left you standing there on that cold night in December. You went there hoping that someone would find you. No, you went there to remind yourself that you don’t need to be found, nor have you been left waiting. The problem is, you don’t know what it looks like to be standing in the tension between those two realities.
