What Washed Ashore

    What washed ashore didn’t amaze me.  Things get thrown into the ocean all the time, and once in the ocean, if they’re not bound to something so heavy as to cause drowning, are destined to float to the surface and succumb to the currents, the whims of the waves.  What amazed me more was the fact that someone else might have come across her before I did, and that I should have seen this coming — how silly of me.

    “You, my darling will need a better hiding place.”  While flatter and grayer, very much deflated and congealed in a sense, she seemed heavier in weight than when she was alive.  I like to think that it was because your spirit, if you believe in that sort of thing, helps to lift you up, the bubbles of laughter, air in those lungs — those happy moments — all contribute to making your body lighter.  I had shared a great deal of happy moments with her when I was in my teens, mostly in secrecy with she being my teacher and I her student, but fate had devised a plan for her that did not include me in it and thus commenced my devising of my own plans of revenge which has just now surfaced on this beautiful day here in this lonesome corner of the beach where the shade is my only friend, on whom I can cast my secrets. 

    A decade’s worth of planning had passed and my artwork has washed up, grabbing for the love and attention I once gave it.  

    With both of my hands gripping her by the armpits, I dragged her towards the woods away from the beach and rested her still body, damp and stiff like a water-soaked log, beneath a tree, then stood up with my back aching.  I looked around me and saw no one sight.  No one was here except for the two of us.  

    “I really did love you, you know,” I said in a whisper, hoping the wind would send it to her ears alone.  But how could she hear?  How does one respond in such a state?  The white of her rolled up eyes mocked me.  The cool grayness of her skin showed an indifference that really was borderline insulting.  “It’s true.  I really mean it.  And everyone always said age is just a number that love ignores.”

    She had nothing to say for herself.

    There was a soft breeze that brushed her dark hair across her face like dried up seaweed landing on a hard rock that had stayed in the same spot on the sand for eons.  

    I sat down next to her, knees cupped in one of my arms and the other arm hanging around her slumped shoulders.  I got comfortable with her as I often did with her before a fire on an unfrequented beach not unlike this one, back before things took a terrible turn.  And I looked out at the ocean, decently choppy, and listened to the sound of the waves bobbing one on top of the other like years crushing years through the relentless funeral procession of time.  They fizzed out onto the sand on the shore, just before reaching us. 

    Then I looked at her and saw our history.  

    I saw our history in the conception of you, and saw what became of me in the dead physical form of you.  

    And I said, “Oh what a lovely portrait of the both of us this would be.”