The Sea’s Gold
Gold is the color I remember. I don’t know why. It must have started with the sun on the water every morning. Sure that would make me late for my chores, but there was nothing stopping my heart from joining the sea.
I had managed to finish my chores early and was sitting by the sea shore as I always did watching the waves clamber onto the sand and leave a mark where its wet fingers grasped for the sand to stay just a little bit longer. It was sitting close enough for the foam to just barely caress my feet while I stared at the black water under the horizon. And suddenly there was a subtle wash of blue underneath the water, but I didn’t notice it until much later when it was closer. The foam dragged me into the water and I found myself getting up and when I was chest deep in water watching an iridescent blue shape flash in and out of the surface range of the water and getting larger. I instinctively took off my clothes and stood in the waves letting it engross me. It wasn’t a God that you read about in Greco-Roman mythology where at this point I would be used as a pleasure source for his own loneliness, but I felt a calling in the sea for me to join it. After all, it never wore clothes and modesty was a trivial mortal emotion that it never understood. All this I got from the movement of the waves and its crashing song within itself. Then I was pulled under and air streamed into my primitive lungs. Because that’s what they were, only meant for air and not all of the minerals in the sea.
I wasn’t truly frightened until this point when I couldn’t feel nor move my legs. I panicked and thrashed wildly against something warm and human-like. And when I opened my eyes, there was someone I related with who had the same trusting love of the sea and he was stuck here in his love for the rest of his life. I recognized him as one of the fisherman’s sons who had disappeared months ago. It didn’t matter who he was, just that he was in this prison with me and we would both have to deal with our decisions that our hearts had made for us.
We could speak, but I didn’t want to. I was not sad for joining the sea, or for leaving my parents behind, but I had pangs of great emotion when I looked up at the sun and what I left was the air on the land. So, gold is the color I remember and the color I envy for each day. Perhaps it will save me when the time is right and bring me up into its golden haven. Or perhaps not, as it knows I would be unhappy there also. There is so much time to think when you have nothing to do each day but to avoid falling prey to the predators of the sea. We just travel with the current and hope to find something new and unusual for us to explore. But it’s a very large world.
