An old story....

Out to Sea

She lay across from me, swaying gently in the colorful hammock. A book lay cracked-open, spine severed, on her rolling stomach. A salty breeze cooled my face as it came softly in off the endless, blue plain. I wiped my brow and sat up, somehow refreshed and somewhat eager to struggle against the dense humidity. In this place, gravity isn’t what keeps you grounded, it’s the humidity. That damn humidity.

My eyes reached out to the cerulean plain, scowering for something, for an image, a beacon. But none came. The land of water just seemed to vanish into the grey horizon, rolling on, and on. I lay back into the womb of my hammock and let my eyes be pulled shut by gravity’s surrogate. I slipped into a dream.

It began, not so much as dreams normally do, but as one of those blurs in reality that can only be brought on by the shear force of heat. I saw coconuts being twisted about in dancing chorus lines, floating up through the sky, higher and higher. Palms and bushes leapt skyward, creating dense jungles of slate sky-scrapers. The white sands shot out over the ocean, setting down four-lane highways of silica. The reality of my surroundings was being pushed and pulled by the pendulous weight of heat. Then I was inside. It was my home; a home that I do not have and maybe never will, but at that moment it was mine. No, it was ours.

She sat in the cushy Lay-Z-Boy, nursing her tea and watching TV. I came around in front of her, turned off the TV, took the mug from her hand and placed it gently on the coffee table next to her. I took her hands into mine, as the questioning look appeared on her face, and pulled her up. Her left hand I put around my neck. Her right, I fit into the palm of my left hand. I grabbed the stereo remote and turned on the burned CD I had made. It was all the songs that we once danced to, long ago, back in the days when we were still young. We waltzed, we salsa’d, we danced for hours around the living room. I twirled her around the furniture and dipped her over chairs. Not a word was said, and we never blinked. She laughed and smiled a coy smile.

Then as the music came to an end and our steps slowed, our motions became more deliberate. The edges of the picture began to blur out. The walls fell. Everything fell. I was standing in the middle of a room that had ceased to be. She was gone, the house was gone; there was nothing but falling color.

I blinked and everything stopped, all was white and then I saw her. Raised above me, shrouded in an ethereal light. She sat there, an unearthly, unbelievable benevolence radiated from her face. Her features had transformed, her being was perfected in the light of my imagination. There she stayed, sitting on her golden cloud, possessed by the winds of time and the light of hope. As the awe struck, she began to ascend. I watched her go and as the figure became a blur, the blur a dot, and the dot a speck I found myself back on the beach. Both hammocks were there, but she was not. I walked around the deserted paradise, looking for memories, clues to what may have happened. I peered out over the endless sea. It looked clearer for some reason. I stepped into one of the tidal pools that lined the beach, feeling the warmth of the sun they had collected travel up my legs. Then something came over me. A feeling to run, to move, to change and I sprinted until I was waist deep in the cool ocean and dove. I cut through the sun heated upper layer and into the dark, cold depths. The bottom of the ocean dropped before my eyes. Endless, bottomless, salient depths. I swam, and swam, deeper and deeper. When my arms began to tire, I just stopped. I rose up through the water, finally free of the humidity’s pull. The lightness of being brought me back to the surface and as my head crested the waves a rush shot through me. I swam back to the beach infused, enthralled with me, with my life, with all that now surrounded me. With the endless possibilities that lay before me on this…new land. I walked up the beach, shaking water from my ears and running my hand through my hair. I walked over to the hammock that was hers. The book with the severed spine lay there. Bathing in the sun, still open to the page on which she had stopped. I picked it up, turned it over. There was only one sentence.

“Wake up.”