My mother travels often with her darling British boyfriend. She brought me two pieces of perfect driftwood from her last trip to the coast of Georgia (who ever thinks of Georgia having a coast line?). One is a small plank, nearly man-made rectangular, but with just enough wiggle an
(more)d dance in the grain that you know it came from more delicate hands than our human ones. The other reminds me of a crab - a near globe of wood, with one beckoning hook holding it steady on the shelf where it now lives. I wonder if driftwood misses the sea. I keep these two pieces by a shelf near the window, so they can see the rain, and remember.
*
I miss the oceans. I like to sit by the open window while it rains, so that when a whiff of the sea falls through my window, I'm there to catch it, just for a glittering, wriggling moment. I remember the long slow fall through the noise and the push of the waves, the hush below them in the green world where spindly spiny things didn't scuttle, they floated, and the darkness at the bottom, phosphorescent eyeless creatures shooting away into the corners of oblivion, a mirror image of the achingly distant and just as suffocating ocean overhead.
*
My bones have dried now. Ancient currents no longer carry me to rough rocky beaches, to be licked by a whispering tide until it swells again and takes me somewhere warmer, softer. I'm here on the land, dragging my fingers through the dirt, trying to make whirlpools.
I'm tethered by slender ankles and heavy bracelets to this solid state. But. Sometimes I lift my arms up to the rain, and my fingertips, all of me, begins to drift away like sand.(less)
