I look around, curious. This is like a child’s painting -- yellow sand and a blue sea mirroring a cloudless sky. There is a smooth rock, dished and inviting. I sit down.
The fine sand sparkles like diamond dust. I feel compelled to touch it. I look at the grains caught on my fingertips and see a different version of myself in each one. There, I am on stage, singing Schubert, the audience applauds my luscious soprano voice. In the next I am sitting at the head of a mahogany table, the board members listening raptly as I confidently outline my plans for further success. So many unfulfilled possibilities, each grain of sand a life I could have lived. A multiverse of potentialities, piled into vast dunes by the choices I made, or failed to make. I brush the sand away, feeling the sharp cuts it leaves behind.
The surf whispers, carrying the fresh scents of salt and ozone. There is a mutuality of imagination, nothing in my life has been one thing or another. I am neither happy nor sad.
The sun kisses my face. Snowy gulls land on the shore. They pick at shells but leave me alone, for I have nothing they want. In the peace of our unshared motives, I admire the balletic strength of their commonplace beauty.
I am not dreaming. I am on this beach, like a once-jagged plank from an ancient shipwreck, smoothed by the waves.
Habit has guided my life to this place, but now the sea lies before me, and the tide is asking for my permission to turn.
Alex Grehy (she/her) is inspired by a reflective life full of nature, rescue greyhounds, singing and chocolate. Widely published, Alex hopes that her words will engage the reader's emotions and help them make sense of the world. Her poetry collections, published by Alien Buddha Press, are available from Amazon.
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