to the sea, to the sea

And then there are the unexpected crash course lessons. Like my friend. This old friend of mine. I learned the most from him. Really. I want to tell him this sometimes, but what would I say? Saying something like that has a way of finalizing the ongoing, of endowing the dynamic with static finality. And it’s hard to explain anyway…how and why I learned so much.
It’s that I believed him. I believed every word he said. Even the bullshit. Because it was true bullshit.
That is, I believed he meant it. Really meant it. Not wanted to mean it or wished he meant it or tried to mean it, he meant it.
Even when drunk and stoned and completely unable to gage where a large percentage of the world was at, he was completely emerged in his own splashing swirling lubricious world.
It was so vibrant. These things he showed me. Thoughts and ideas reflecting in prisms off the surface of his sea. You know how the sun sets over the ocean? All that water has a way of the reflecting even the last bits of day.
He smiled and I saw joy. He cursed and the room vibrated. Oh he was big and you could feel it when he walked in the room and his voice boomed and I saw him make people uncomfortable. Like squinting at a very big light, like the knowledge of your image in such illumination.
You could see yourself. And it was embarrassing.
And what did I see in this light?
I saw how much of my own life as governed by reluctance and analysis. How much of what I did was about who I wanted to be and not who I was. I saw myself, always first reflected off of others before I could get a glimpse of who I was. I saw the warnings and the footnotes and the disclaimers and the context I was so careful to supply when I allowed others to see me.
I saw the removal.
And I also saw myself outside this. Unable to hide, finally giving up a bit of that circumspect analytical justification. It was hot and it was exciting and I was sexy and smart and happy and I couldn’t help but to laugh. I was everything I hoped I was and all these horrible things I suspected I might be.

It’s not a matter of simplicity or intensity. That has little to do with what I learned.
I quite simply, learned the many ways in which we fail ourselves when we take the circumlocutious path to the truth. When we measure out want and desire and hope with our mind and not our heart.

See, when I was young I would sit in the back of my parents car and I would gaze at this small seaport town we would pass as we made our way from our city to another. In the back of my mind I pictured myself happy and settled in this small port town. But really what I wanted was to be closest to the sea.
Sure, I loved the mountains and I liked the lakes, I liked cities and building and all the people, but they were nothing compared to that sense of being so close to the ocean, the smell of the salt and the sounds of the waves and the vague awareness and fear of all that power. Every childhood fantasy tied up in dock dreams and the hope for a salt sheen on my skin.
And I settle on a city by the river because other things matter too. And I think of ways to visit the sea. And I dream of the sea and I always fall for these blue eyed men, stormy reflections of my first impression.
Sometimes I wonder at the choices my mind continues to allow me to make.