White Shores

I’ve been down by the sea inspecting the waves as they collapse on the shore. The wind bites as the smoke from a cigarette eddies into the heavens. Strangely, I don’t smoke. I feel entangled with everything like the universe was one big function and I’m but a minuscule constant.
What romanticism for what is glorified meat: our brains. We all come from dirt only to return to the fold. Buried beneath a turf for grazing, a brane above hell. Somewhere in the heavens. I’ve lost my train of thought.

I hear a knock at my door and go to answer. The door cannot be opened. I try the windows and find they are also locked and shuttered. And yet they’re still knocking. I’m trapped in my apartment. The knocking doesn’t stop. This is the nightmare of the intellectual. Of thwarted curiosity. To be vaulted within a system which beckons from beyond.

I dissociate, He tries every avenue. He listens to the pattern of the knocking and tries to decipher a code. He tries to hear where on the outer door the knocking strikes perhaps there is a correspondence between the wood grain and the noise. There must be a message somewhere. Like trying to interpret a painting at gunpoint, he gets lost within the metaphors for dread.

The waves collapse upon the pebbled shore like swirling galaxies. Multitudinous droplets fly stars flinging through ultraviolet universes. A winter’s white, prisming into the implicit colors of all seasons.

The sea and the beach are the same color. Foggy white. The kind of white literature scholars obsess over not purity, but that vast, terrifying repository. The white that bleeds colors into everything else, only to be absorbed again by the black expanse. The negative slate of reality.

It’s a cold afternoon on Christmas Day. I came down here to get out of the house. You get claustrophobic after a while especially as an agoraphobe. Fears multiply fears.

I grab my bag and stick my hands deep into my coat pockets. There’s a hole in the left one. Snow flakes tinsel the wind, which still bites. I begin heading home. The vast well of water droplets that is the deep blue sea continues to flow without my supervision unfolding itself into implicating waves.

Far off in the distance, I can make out the splotchy outline of someone else. I can’t tell if they’re moving or if it’s the flurries. What brought them out to this void on this holiday?

I head in their direction.