Facing Land

As a writer, I had always looked for those things in life which might hold some meaning or significance beyond whatever they held for me personally. Images, conversations, encounters which, you know, might hold a glimmer of what my professors had once called "universal truths."

Now, in the aftermath of my wife's passing, my life is filled with them. They wash up against me, every minute of every day. Like the tiny waves against the back of my legs as I stood just off the sandy peninsula of my childhood. Facing land, facing away from the great and ever-moving body of water behind me.

Regardless of how I turned or where I stood, it was still out there. Now, as then, I feel it in more than just those tiny, breeze-driven ripples that surrounded me. It's a huge and timeless presence in which powerful riptides sometimes lurk, often only a hundred yards or so offshore; it's a presence which has driven mighty freighters, with everything and everyone on board, to its very bottom.

And that is how it is for me. I have felt the passing currents of a love lost and then found and then lost again. But I greatly fear to turn and face towards it, to wade more deeply into it.

Because I've never been a swimmer and I fear that I might drown...

LPK
@Dreamwidth
5.7.2017