Day One

Born of the Sea

My first memory is that of tumbling in a salt water chaos, gasping for breath and fighting to keep from being pulled down under the suffocating waves. I'm barely alive, semi-conscious but aware that I must fight to reach the surface. Before my arms give out and my lungs are burned from an avalanche of sea and salt, I am washed upon a velvet pink shoreline. I am no more than 12 or 13, but with no memory of anything before that. Where I came from, I cannot say for certain. I am born of the sea, delivered by the crest of a wave upon a bed of sand. The ocean is my Mother, but my Father is unknown to me.

I don't remember the boat or the journey, just the salt and the foam. As I turn myself over to face my land savior I recall the sun was clouded and a light rain fell. Perhaps a storm had turned over my boat or I have fallen out of the sky. But who else was with me? And where was I? And who am I?

I had nothing but my own clothes, and barely any of them still intact. I am alone, in some unknown place, in an unknown time. The shells cling to my body like the skin of a mango. All these parts and pieces of green, aqua, and purple, a sequin mosaic of time and tiny mollusks. They cling to me as if I am their own. And they are the only thing I do own, yet I was their opposite. They are the home without tenant, and I am the outcast with no home.

I study them as I remove each piece and wonder where my pain is the worst. My head throbs but doesn't bleed yet the sting of the sea is constant. But the contrast of pain and beauty is apparent. The sky, the sea, the sway of the trees and before me lies a bed of sand as long as I can see in either direction. I stumble away from the water to grass as soft as cotton as I fall to its surface. Scanning the mirrored water for some sign of a boat, a wreck, a human or something, anything to ease my growing anxiety of emptiness. There is nothing. No hint of anything hopeful but blue and silver and green, and most unfortunately burnt orange as the sun ignites the western horizon. For the time being, apparently I am home. My new home. As I learned to breath again on dry land I could see that darkness was setting in. As beautiful as the light and ocean appeared they would soon give way to a type of night I had never known before.

I searched the shoreline for someplace to lie down, to sleep and hopefully to awaken from this painful reality. Darkness swept the beach rapidly and fear as black as the sky was sweeping across me. I ran now to escape from something I didn't understand and could not have been prepared for. I ran until I tripped upon a rock. This rock that turned out to be one rock atop a second of equal size. I was tired, afraid, cold and now crippled on a slab as hard as the fortune I'd inherited. And yet, the coldness of this stone was quickly changing as I lay upon it. Somehow, it was warming with my body and strangely soothed my pain and cold. I pushed the top stone aside and found that underneath was a hollow stone of the same material. I decided that this place would be my bed for the night. I crawled into the curved, smooth rock and felt it accept my tired and broken body.

My first day was unlike any I had ever spent, or so I thought not knowing how I'd spent any others. And my night, while lonely and fear filled was full of dreams of the light of the new day. For that was the only thing I felt sure of.