A Faulty Wire

I left my apartment at about 9:40 and the skies are cloudy - deeply cloudy. Who knows if they will burn off at all today. Maybe we will never see the sun again. I just don’t have any kind of guarantee that the sun will show itself again.

I park and walk down the stairs. It’s a nice place to be in any weather. I feel the warm air on my skin and the asphalt paving just above the shore feels especially coarse today. I wonder how long it has been since this road was paved. Maybe a thousand years? That certainly seems about right.

There are a few surfers out riding the leftovers from the south swell that is now easing. There is a little texture on the water’s surface and everything here looks grey and a little misty. As soon as my feet touch the water, I can tell that it has warmed. This is going to be nice. A set of larger waves comes in as I am walking out past the surf and I dive beneath the white water and feel the pressure of the wave’s impact absorbed by my mid-back as I glide beneath the turbulence through a space of relative calm just above the ocean floor.

I swim south today and the water just feels rediculously comfortable. This can’t be much warmer than the community pool in my apartment complex. When I reach the south end of the beach, I just relax here and it feels so very nice. There is absolutely no tension between the water and my skin. Is this what it feels like when one finds their sleep number?

There is a fine mix of pelicans, gulls and cormorants on the water today. As I stare towards either end of the coast, everything looks so misty. I feel a yearning inside of me to get somewhere. I want to arrive at some place and I don’t know how to get there. I have vague images in my mind and hints of feelings that come to me like transmissions over a faulty wire. I can just make out enough of these messages to get a gist of what it is I am being drawn towards. How do I get there? Well here I am out in the open ocean and looking north up the beach I only see one way to get from where I am to where I am heading: I just need to put my head down and move my arms and legs and trust my body to get me to the other side.

I pop my head up from time to time and right my trajectory when it looks as though I am heading too deep offshore. The lifeguard tower becomes my silent guide. It doesn’t need to do anything but simply stand where it is at and provide me with a point at which to set my focus. Yeah I’d like to just know if I need to veer left or right without looking up to it or, then again, would I? I rather enjoy just staring at it.