Salt

The light glimmers and pools like mercury, slippery-quick, throbbing unsteadily as though keeping time with the vast heart of the ocean. Somewhere in the distance between us, these shifting and tumbling cascades of salt blush warm with the intimacy of the moment - the brush of a distant sun, the contact fleeting, thrilling, exhilarating - and struggle to leap high and soar free, loosened from the numbing, infinite pressures of fluid. Your laughter skips across the water like a stone: wild with kinetic joy, spinning, spiraling, whipping in tight, frenzied circles faster than I can perceive.

The soft crush and hushed collapse of water against water against sand. The shrill cries of gulls, angular blades of ivory cutting across blue sky. And your voice, registering higher and higher, as you turn against the tide - your arms pinwheeling along the surface, delighting with each new wave - and exhult in this new freedom: you, unleashed upon the sea, seal-smooth in your red swim shirt and shorts, a berry afloat and ripened to bursting with sweetness, sweetness, such great and full sweetness, tiny fish nibbling at your toes as you laugh and whirl and the world whirls with you and

I watch, from a distance,

while beyond you slender cusps of sail catch the wind like water in the palm of your hand, grow full as lungs ballooning with breath and cut with precision and certainty of purpose toward that point where sea blends to sky and

with each spin your smile grows broader, your teeth tiny sand-roughened pearls, opalescent, salt-sprayed and shone to new luster

tasting the new world, savoring each breath

the landscape shifting and recalibrating, heartbeat by eyeblink, your legs splayed broad and steady against sand and smooth stone, your pulse racing with the sun as it leaps from wavetop to wavetop, speed reduced from facts and physics to the crystalline purity of now as you

free

of rigor and demand, patience and pratice and repetition and the weight, that crushing weight, of hope grafted to expectation, and all those years you've borne it with bravery - each small step, forward or back, followed by a next, and a next, and the next as they stretch forward to forever - but here, wrapped in light and wonder, it falls away like an old skin, and you are reborn on the waters.

You are a leaf, all autumn auburns and sandy browns and long, thin limbs radiating outward at strange and shifting angles, all hollow bones and lighter than air, borne along with the currents in slow, graceful twists, thrilling at the unfamiliar sensation of release

as I watch, from my distance, not quite letting go

of all that you were, or may become,

but ever aware of your generous smile, your gift of laughter, your joy of the moment

and the deeper waters, lying not far beyond.