Water

As silly as it sounds, I have always felt that water is my element.

Water can carve its way, even through stone.
And when trapped, water makes a new path.

My name means “white wave.” This suits me.
I’ve never really had a sense of “home,” but rather, I’ve trickled my way through the world and traveled over its oceans. Despite my best efforts at stoicism, I am an emotional young woman, coming and going with every high and low of the tide.

“…is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions?”

Rumbling with my rolling discontent and breaking upon the shore, I’ve beat my fist on the ground to no prevail. Erosion takes a millennium. I wander back out with the tide, helplessly in the undertow of life, which is too large for me to comprehend. None of my tears will water down this vast expanse within which I am suspended and tossed about; the sea has always been salt.
But I do not want the lessons of driftwood. What a horrid name!

To drift: –verb (used without object)　
to be carried along by currents of water or air, or by the force of circumstances.　
to wander aimlessly.　
to be driven into heaps, as by the wind: drifting sand.　
to deviate or vary from a set course or adjustment.

There are times when I am tumbled under choppy breakers.
Yet those from the shoreline might glimpse my frame and see flexibility and freedom, a lithe, young soul unrestrained and blending in with her surroundings elegantly, dancing with graceful arcs of the back, smoothly going with the flow. Perhaps the universe looks down from omniscient heights and sees the rough and jagged edges of a hardened, frightened soul giving way to the beauty of soft, rounded curves which shine with the glossy polish of refinement.

So I am a stone
rough and grainy still.
Trying to reconcile this river’s chill.
But when I close my eyes
and feel it rushing by
I know that time brings change
and change takes time.
And the when the sunset comes
my hope would be this one:
that you might pick me up and notice that I am
just a little smoother in your hand.

And while I whelm in gulfs far over my head and long to be unmovable, I have lost not only my breath but my perspective.
I look inward too often rather than looking up and around and off into the distance.
My inner reflections must lead me back out to face the world with wide eyes and open arms or else they are useless. I want my vision to be clear and unclouded by waterlogged emotions.

Perhaps it’s the human condition to feel that we float aimlessly on the current. Is there a some way to drift purposefully? Could there be a balance in that no matter where we may alight, whatever shore we may wash up on, there are people there to be with and lessons to be learned?
Could it be that as we busy ourselves with the bonding of hearts and the balming of wounds, we will be taken out of the depths of raging seas and no longer be submerged in darkness?

I doubt it… but I hope so.
I hope.
Maybe that’s all I need.
I hope.