From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

I packed for rain: sweaters and books, a bag of dry lentils for making soup, cinnamon-infused brandy for hot toddies, slippers, movies... and every day the sun has burned through, the sky bright and blue. October, and I found myself lying on a sheet on the beach, skin bared to the sun, napping, reading, eating potato chips, drinking beer.

I took a long walk each day, along the shoreline that I have known my whole life, the one that is always shifting imperceptibly beneath me, the one that has always been there, the one that is my foundation. A foundation of sand somehow makes the most perfectly solid and tenuous all at once metaphor for all that is my life.

My nose and the apples of my cheeks are kissed with pink, my shoulders brown. My legs feel stretched long from their loose swing and sway. I am happy to be here, and I am ready to go home.

I've been feeling lately like mining my heart for content, scanning the horizon for something to say, the right thing to say, the right way to say it. It is the artist's struggle, the painfully mundane and predictable artist's struggle. But I have been remembering things, feelings, remembering the shape of hope, the formlessness of how words tangle, and the certain kinds of images that rearrange the deepest places in that ever-shifting foundation of sand in that thing that I call my heart. I've been scrambling to capture ideas again, not with the same fierceness of those early days of my first thesis, but in the way I felt when I spent 2 weeks here.

It was this time of year, 8 years ago. I was on medical leave from work, and I was scrambling to rearrange my life into a something I could fit inside, something that could fit inside of me. Those days here felt long and good, languid and bright. I gathered tiny pieces of driftwood that reminded me of wintered trees and  even smaller red and golden leaves, leaves smaller than my pinky nail, and arranged and rearranged them into tiny tableaus on the beach. I made postcards, and took photographs, and rerooted myself to this place of my familial and familiar history. I watched sunsets and stayed up too late in the empty house alone, I walked the shore at midnight, and spread myself out in the sand to stare at the stars. I drank wine and remembered that fluttering beating heart inside my chest, the leaping and settling of my gut as I felt my way slowly, steadily, unsurely back into myself.