A Few Summers Ago

I signed up to help my uncle at my mother’s behest. His house near the beach was roomy enough, the old sycamores lining the street, white and yellow, gave some shade throughout the summer. The ocean nearby, and the beach full of treasures, shells and scraps, a nice expanse to look out upon, and the wind to hide from with intonations of the ancestral voices that the house foretells.

If walking with the sun is enough for the day, the sleep and dream is too much for the night.

It was not long before I missed my friends, and the disorder of my uncle left me resentful, and with feelings of unsettledness and confused mind the void and passive disorder propelled me to movement and wreck. I wanted to get away with all my heart, and I thought I could return, I thought I could.

Did I take upon myself too much sickness, too much of the void, did I stare too long at the sun? How can I control or balance a self I could not understand that wished to escape its surroundings? How could I reach a true home?

The hermit crabs point their tails in unison at the expanse of salt and sea.

Their only locomotion is the waves and I find them in pieces up and down the beach.

I miss the forested trees and the smell of earth, the hills with grasses and burning leaves. I miss the earth of my youth.

Salt and sand, flat and angular, they rake the sands and place the filth under the beach for the tourists. For some reason folding chairs keep breaking underneath me. I fall on my back in the sand to see the blue sky and hear the ocean laugh.

I feel now I can not go back and I dream of her and can not reach out. I am lost without a home and I am not comforted by the waves, I am not comforted by my duties. I can heal no further, a mind that will die, a mind disordered and escaping.

The flocks of birds above the houses often roost in the sycamores. They seem to sing for each other and they fly together. They only come out in the summer, and the winter is drab and song-less gray.

The cold reality, the necessity that I must shelter here, better than no place, is little comfort. I can only keep myself clean and ignore the rest, keep myself fed and consider that enough.

The black cat, his cat, we ignore as it cries to eat, cries to go out, cries and is ignored, cries and it is ignored.