From the Past, With Love

 Hey,

I want to thank you for showing me how to watch the waves. 

Wherever you are I want you to know that I haven't changed. I hope you haven't changed either but I know I haven't, I kept that promise. It was honestly the least I could do for... everything I guess. 

I don't live home anymore I've long moved. But sometimes I when I walk into the boardwalk at night, when the beach is silent and there is the faintest smell of food trucks that are left alone at the night it almost feels the same. Especially when the glowing neon from the fairs are still hot in the air, then it almost feels the same. Now that I think about it when the crows flock fence post to fence post like schools of fish from a wale, that is when it almost feels the same.

But really none of those are right. It's like you told me about the streetlight effect: you only search for something where its easiest to look. So I think you were and are always with me, I just forget to remember it sometimes. 

That's why I love the waves. After school is out and my shift at the market ends I come here to the waves. Enamored in their rhythmic persuasion as they dance up and down the shore getting closer and closer to my spot in the sand but never quite reaching, I can always remember over here. 

 In my youth I remember us running through the cities as I would imagine our ancestors once did. They used vines, rivers, and birds, while we use concrete, car horns, and ego. I would get the paper cups and you would get the wine as we hopped rooftop to rooftop all evening long. Vibrations would ring out narrow sidewalks with our laughter and our heavy breath would hum in line with the sights of music and flavor of the lights. 

We go from small cafe to indie venue to botanic garden to planetarium to school to abandoned house to skating rink to small cafe. A journey with no destination. We keep going nowhere, nowhere turns into somewhere, somewhere turns everywhere until we end up at the pier just before dawn.

You point out at the waves, how with each stroke they pass energy in a circular motion, so that it is never still. You go on to talk about the moon, the oscillation, the gravity of it all, but I'm still stuck on the rotation. Quietly and eternally the waves crash on in an endless battle rotating every second of every day. And with it, we rotate as well.

I want to be sorry about all those things that I said to you. I want to be sorry about how I made you cry. I want to be sorry about who I was. But I am not, because every second with you was another second in blissful eternity. 

I was in class the other day when I was learning about a Greek myth. So it goes, humans used to live with two heads, four arms, four legs, and one heart. The gods decided to separate them to the humans we know today. After that happened humans suffered in misery for years because they couldn't eat and couldn't rest without their body whole. But for some people who were lucky enough they found their other half, their soulmate.

I don't know how much I believe in that. Still, that must be a horrible fate to be the ones that failed. To never accomplish happiness, to never have peace, to never have home. But like people say home isn't a place, its a feeling. 

That's why I wrote this letter, actually to thank you. Because every time I watch the waves, wherever I am, I'm at home.

I think maybe in an alternate universe we could have still been together. I was raw and new and you were sweet and devoted. I can see us even right now together here on this beach, with every crashing of waves an undiscovered path is forged for our future. And in that universe we are more than ink spots on this earth filled with brick, fireflies, and Monsters Inc. figurines, we are unbridled passion in an abyss of boundless possibility. 

But we don't live there, we live here, in front of waves that unpredictable and aggressive. No that is not right, we live here, in front of waves that are unknown. There is a tide, one that occurs every night that when taken afloat leads to adventure and wealth. But laid to waste, it drowns us in the sad morsels of a hideous fate: the present. 

And thus, here I am, like I have been for every night for every year for the last three years. Hoping I have the courage to take afloat on this tide and seek out my soulmate. But, like I have been for every night for every year for the last three years, I decide not to. 

Maybe tomorrow, I'll find my way home. 

With Love,

Yours