The missing shoreline

It’s funny how the missing shoreline of your life can find you one-day swimming out of your depth and the next day stranded like a floundering fish in a desert and fried by the sun and tired beyond all endurance to find a way home.
In such a wasteland, one must surely shrivel up and lose all hope and never to find love again but wander lost and alone forever.

Even ship-wrecked sailors arriving alive at the shoreline find hope and pull them-selves out to carry on the business of living. While those who never find the shoreline will give up in the waves of the endless ocean as the lover without love must give up in the endless moments of life without the fulfilling embrace of their beloved so desperately longed for.
So, when five feet six inches of all you love takes a train south and says she’s not coming back it kind of throws a spanner in the works of your day and quite a few days to come.
Having a lot of friends can feel to be a burden when you want to be left alone. When one does get in they don’t usually come back after a drunken evening of remorseful one-sided conversation on the same subject.
And work is something you don’t go back to after the first couple of days.
Everything I looked at reminded me of her and would bring on a fresh round of tears until I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided to get away and take stock of where my life was going, or where it had ended up.
I didn’t really have a plan in mind; I just knew I didn’t want to be where I was. But little did I know then that what I felt had nothing to do with geography and that what I was going through I took with me everywhere I went and infected all I came in contact with.

And so, I naively attempted to flee from my troubles and ended up on a tropical beach completely alone and across the world from what I most loved, and still shedding tears whenever anyone wasn’t looking and often when they were.
I felt like I had no control over my feelings to the extent I eventually became a shattered wreck and began to curse the very God I didn’t believe in. But constant pain will do that to a person after too long of pining with your whole being for what filled your heart but now has left only a huge hole of separation.
All day long every day the pain in my side was an ache that became intolerable, that no amount of alcohol would drown away.
But time mends all wounds eventually, or at least will cover the wound up enough for you to get on with your life.
And so, after a year of being a miserable recluse I began to notice the incredibleness of where I was and took up photography to try to capture in an image the beauty I’d never really noticed before.
After many practice shots I became good at it and my work began to sell. So, I made the choice to carry on and travel from place to place and let the camera dictate my destination.

From time to time I’d put a note from my heart in the sea and watch it float away with no real expectations any more of it going anywhere but to the bottom of the ocean with all the other notes I’d sent.
After a few years of this I became good at writing notes that became longer and longer and from seemingly out of the blue I had a book written.
And now, years later there are many books and all of them say: I miss you still.
Everyone has different degrees of anger and if channelled in the right way can have a positive outcome. Anger is a powerful energy and the trick is to use it and not let it use you. Anger uncontrolled is the first great barrier to achieving master of the self.

To prevent the disintegration of many who would listen ingenuous devices have been made to keep you here; do you go dream if the house is empty all that went before? And if what went before is less than your dream can you devise something else? Of course, I hear you say, many walk this way of their own calling; and here they come full of their voices put on like a coat to be taken off in the thoughts to prevent disintegration.

It is dark outside as I lie here. Your abandoned incense burns clouding this space. Indian music drifts in and out of my wounds. Today I am small, getting smaller.

As a train rumbles past the open window a tired leaf blows in through forever carrying a photograph of you that gleams like the teeth of the wolf under the full moon.

How high is the moon on your battered suitcase in another hall of your life? You stand dilapidated hissing at the moon with your Indian rocks filling your pockets. The fifth message was yes but it came too late.

Today I thought of you and smiled and thought of you thinking of me and smiling too.

Images from Pixabay