|
|
|
I lean into the five o'clock San Diego Pacific Ocean breeze and it ruffles my just-washed hair. The sun-blonde locks swirl around my face, drying messily into gracefully wavy and lazy curls that will frame my round face once the breeze leaves.
All at once I smell the ocean's waves, inhaling deeply the scent of shallow tide pools below, the kelp forest far away, and the clean air washing off of the ocean, barely polluted by cars yet into the day. The aroma is crisp... it washes my senses of the humid, sweaty state of Texas and its noisy suburb I live in and love so much. My parents are awake; cooking in the small kitchen of this two-floor three-room open flat while my sister groans once and turns in the sofa bed.
I stand, trying not to look to the fifty feet below me to the patio, leaning peacefully on the whitewashed porch rail underneath my elbows. The curls blow once more, and I have to brush one off of my neck. It's cool, this breeze, and makes the hairs on my bare arms stand on end, tiny bumps forming just barely enough to be seen with a flashlight casting their little miniature shadows.
I kiss the wind, the ocean air, and pray to God that I can reserve this little space of heaven and peace for even a few more listless moments of silence. The smell of coffee wafts up to me from the open window below, as all the windows are open in San Diego on the second floors, barely directed by still point of air. And then the ocean comes and takes me away once more, lifting me off of my feet and into the wonderfully pristine ambiance. A few early gulls make their cries, diving at the ocean just before the tide washes in and splashes once of them away. A pelican, quietly in its serenity, takes a single look at me with my Texan-natural tan, wavy blonde hair, and cargo pants and green-gray eyes, then sails away, flapping once its broad white-edged-with-black wings, to join another pelican in their graceful ballet of the morning breeze.
I close my eyes halfway and forget about all of this as a single salty droplet falls down my cheek, making my cheekbones blotchy pink. Another, and then another, fall, as I remember that we haven’t spoken in several days, and how lonely I feel whenever this happens. My unrequited love joins this euphony of colors and sounds as the last dregs of fog roll away from the horizon and the sea, bringing with it more rays of colorful sunshine, and I force myself out of a slump and into what was once a glorious morn. I try to brush away the tears, but then more fall, and more… I listen for my phone that slides further down into my pocket as I shift my weight from one foot to the other, straining to hear it ring as I have so many times before. But I know it won’t sound its call. It can’t… you’re still asleep, asleep with the early morning that it is back in your own home in a suburb of Dallas Forth Worth, not even caring about whether or not I have tears falling for you. Not even wondering whether or not I’m okay, or that my eyes are red.
My long-lash-framed lids fall closed as I try to recover my thoughts. I think about the colors of the clouds, their sunset pink and orange, the plethora of hues they’d been and were turning now, but lighter, less bold than when the sun had sunk behind them the previous evening. But… I think then about how I’d have loved to watch that very same sunset with you… and have to force the cries back for a more peaceful avenue. A safer avenue, where you don’t stand like a closed door in my loving emotions, where we’re merely “good friends.” Where those chaotic, wonderful, terrible, blissful, confusing memories and feelings don’t exist. Into the ocean, where I swim through the kelp with tiny, glittering fish with scaly arms, silky hair, and a fin for locomotion. Just like the vertebrates that surround me. My dorsal gets caught onto something—it’s pulling, pulling, trying to take me away from my paradise. It has the sound of tinny metal clashing and a piano breaking into a million tiny pieces, falling forty stories to the street below, where thousands of screaming pedestrians try to run, but are crushed and splintered.
And then reality strikes. My hand is closed around my buzzing, vibrating cellular phone. It plays a tune from one of Bach’s piano pieces. It reminds me of you again and I draw back from the balcony with a single tear making its tread down my face… the last I hope to shed this week.
Though this happens months and months before I realize my feelings and cling to you, It feels so real.
|
|
|
|
|
|
