Burried In The Sand

Katherine walked down the path to the beach, slipping her feet free of her sandals as she finally reached the sand that had begun to chill in the night air. She walked through the sand with the salt breeze teasing her hair into her eyes, not bothering to push it away. Beneath her feet the chill ebbed into her feet but she barely felt it.
         After a while she simply stopped and dropped down in the sand, drawing drawing her knees up in front of her and wrapping her arms around her legs as she looked out over the moonlit water. She tucked her skirt beneath her feet to keep it from being blown by the breeze and simply looked out over the water, still numb to the chill of the night.
         Her thoughts played over the light ripples in the water like an image cast on a movie screen before her. Thoughts of her past, thoughts of all her possible futures. So many choices lay ahead of her and she had no idea where to begin. She closed her eyes for a moment, a single tear sliding down her cheek, falling to add more salt to the sand that cradled her like an old friend.
         Finally she could look back on the memories of a lost love without falling apart, without feeling that searing pain that once had been there. For the first time in years the wound was closed and she could look at each memory fully and see the joy as much as the hurt. At last she could say that path had truly come to an end, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that two paths that had merged for so long were finally parting into two again.
         Now before her lay a new choice, one she did not have a certainty of. Was this new love for someone that had been an illusion? Had it meerly been a spiders web meant to snare her and now he thought he believed her caught on it’s threads and unable to escape. If so more the fool he. Katherine would never be trapped, never again. From her closed past she had gained at least one thing, the strength to walk away no matter how tightly she was ensnared in the web, the strength to break it’s threads and once more fly free. Yes she would be battered but the pain would go away, her heart would become as cleansed as her lungs were being cleansed now by the cool breeze.
         She watched her thoughts swim acrossed the waters surface, watched the flashes that had shown her the possibility of a stranger. There was still the chance that circumstance had created a temporary stranger and that the love was real. Whichever the case she knew she had the strength to break swim free if she dove too deep into something that wasn’t real in the time it took to find out for certain and she knew too that she had to know for certain.
         She watched the sea begin to devour the sand before her as the tide rose and realized with a certainty that she would never let love devour her so completely again, not without being absolutely certain that it was true and right. As the reaching waves began to grab at the edge of her skirt she stood, her heart at ease. As she’d watched her thoughts cast on those moonlit waters she’d realized for herself that she had the strength to wait for the truth and to hope for a brighter tomorrow. She knew at last that she had the strength to believe that love could exist and she didn’t have to run away from the slightest hint that it might not be true.
         As the tide swallowed the sand she made her way back home, back to the uncertainty that she knew she could face. She walked away from the moonlit thoughts and the fears that had lain in her heart. Fears that now lay burried in the sand that was being swallowed by the waves along with the painful memories that had created them.