Surfing the Waves

It's kinda' like surfing, you know. The waves break, that's what you ride. You can't ride a placid, calm sea. The bigger the wave, the harder the crash. If only monsooning, turbulent seas weren't also dangerous to surf in!

Our relationship was kind of like that. All sorts of big, wonderful waves, but only in the deeper ocean, no surf breaking. Not at least the surf that's lovely enough to ride. In the beginning, you could almost say it was placid and calm, that "sea of love" sort of thing. People in canoes with guitars played by Mexicans in sombreros. And then we moved closer to the shore, closer to the monsoon... little by little. The little white flecks of surf began to show, like white hairs cracking the careful monotone of your young head. We broke under the pressure of circumstance, or maybe just I did. Just like its not the waves trying to be crass, but just the action of all that power, pulled by the gravity of the moon onto a shore too shallow to contain it ...

And then came the beautiful waves. Perfect days outside, magnificent waves inside. A surfer's paradise, the waves stood miles high, the breakers white and even, stretching as far as the board would go.

I became part of the pounded surf, pounded over and over and over against the cruel coral of the shallow shore. Since then I've been flotsam, floating every now and again, pounded at others. No longer part of the sea but external to it, an itty bit of trash, meeting jetsam along the way but never really keeping to any of it. I hope I'll never be washed up - I hope I can end up back on the placid ocean - but sometimes I don't know. Maybe its better to be washed up, out of the dangers of the waves of life.

I still see him. We're but friends now. But even if everything's okay on the surface, I'm right back, being pounded into surf when he leaves. They say, you should delete it all, but deleting him would be deleting what's important to me. Memories are all I have, and they are all I hoard, even if it means I'm still only flotsam, a year and a half later. There's always an invisible, yet dangerous undertow, isn't there?