The sea and the woman

There are loves you stumble upon like seashells delicate, unexpected, easily held in your hand. They are beautiful, yes, but they are small, finite, and one day the tide takes them back.

And then there are loves that are not stumbled upon at all, loves that are summoned. Loves that arrive as if they have been on their way to you since the first wave touched the first shore.

The sea gave me everything I could have ever wanted, but she did not give it quickly. No, the sea has never been in the business of rushing. She knows how to wait. She knows the taste of longing. She knows that the finest treasures must be earned, carried in on the slow breath of tide after tide, until the shoreline you stand on is not the same one you began upon.

I thought I had learned her language, the silence between waves, the patient pull of the undertow, the way she keeps her secrets until you have proven yourself worthy to hear them. But then, the sea spoke to me in a voice I had never heard before.

She gave me her...

It was not a meeting, it was a recognition. As if I had been walking the same shore my entire life searching for something unnamed, and there she was, not a stranger, but the echo of a name I had always known, the missing shape in the hollows of my soul.

Some nights I imagine how it must have been, the sea carrying her across vast and unending blue, keeping her safe through storms ,cradling her in gentle swells when she was weary. And when the moment was right, the tide laid her at my feet with the quiet pride of a god who knows it has just rewritten your fate.

She loves me in the way the sea loves the moon, with a devotion so constant, so certain, that distance means nothing. And I love her as the shore loves the tide, ready to meet her every return, no matter how far she drifts.

Ours is a love without beginning or ending .It feels older than memory ,as though the salt in my blood has always known the salt in hers. We are made of the same tide. The same call. The same inevitable pull.

The sea has rewritten the very map inside me. Where there were once barren stretches, there are now salt water gardens. Where there were hollow places, there is now something wild and alive.

When I close my eyes, I can feel the weight of water folding over us, the silence of waves sealing every vow between us. Not vows made of paper and ink, but vows born in the deep. Unchangeable, unbreakable, eternal as the tide itself.

And in those depths, there is no fear of the end. Only the pull. Only the return. Only the knowing that some loves are the ocean’s gift, and the ocean never takes back what she loves.

-jlinden