Homecoming

I stood on the edge of the sand, my stomach doing flip-flops and twisting itself like a circus contortionist, the way stomachs are wont to do when a particularly furious storm is coming. The air was calm, but the tension was thick, like a current that had built up at the base of my spine and could only race up and down it again and again.

I tilted my head back and waited for the rain.

The sky overhead was obscured by fat, dark, heavy clouds that hung deceptively low to the ground and made it seem like they might all tumble down on me at once.

I curled my toes down into the wet sand (the sand had been dry a few moments earlier, but the tide had come rushing in since then, climbing the shore and saturating the frayed edges of my jeans as if to invite me in) and stared out across waves that looked like vast black mountains in the fading light.

I always enjoy going to the beach. It’s the perfect balance between water and earth, and it’s the edge of the unknown. Once you step into the ocean, you’re surrendering most, if not all, of your control. From there on out, you’re at the mercy of the sea. I guess I like the idea of throwing myself into the most destructive natural force on planet earth and coming out of it alive.

On a sunny day, the waves sparkle and glitter like liquid gemstones, and on those days I like to throw water in the air just so I can watch them hang there for a split second with the sun shining through them. For that instant, it’s like I’ve hung stars in the blue morning sky. I can dive into the water and feel the salt wash over my skin, and into my cuts. I can feel it enter my bloodstream and start to heal me. I can feel it calling me back home.

I think we all have a connection to the ocean at a very basic, instinctual level. It was our home for eons before the first amphibian decided to see what would happen if it flopped its way up onto that “big, dry thing,” and not even billions of years of evolution and solid ground beneath our feet can make us forget that entirely. Just as we instinctually remember being the amphibian, the ocean remembers being our primordial, soup-y home.

Then there’s days like today. The minute I wake up, there’s a tense anticipation in my gut, some kind of hyperaware knowledge that today, the sky’s going to lash the earth with rain and roar with thunder and light up the horizon with forked lightning. As the storm builds up overhead, so do these feelings, and by the end of the day I’m as ready to burst as the clouds above me. I get to the beach as fast as I can, because the beach is the only stage worthy for this show.

The water has soaked my jeans up to the knees, and the rain hasn’t even started to fall yet. The black mountains are getting larger now, or maybe they’re just getting closer, but either way, they’re reaching for the sky, their sharp tips set to pierce the clouds that are heavy with rain and finally give them some relief. They are swollen, like expectant mothers, not yet quite able to give birth. Holding back for some unknown, inexplicable reason. I spread my arms, and they finally burst. Within those first few second, I’m completely soaked. The wild winds tug at my shirt, pulling it flat against my skin, and I stop dividing myself from the water, and welcome it. There's no longer the ocean and me; there's just the ocean.

In that second, the entire world stops. Time has no meaning; all that matters is the water that’s calling me out deeper and deeper, calling me home. It washes the earth away from my feet, and pulls me against the wind. There’s a roar of thunder in the distance, and a bright flash of forked light in the distance, and it illuminates the suddenly huge black mountains that are crashing and rising around me, as the crescendo of a planetary symphony, directed by some cosmic conductor.

I dive into the water, and I’m home.