About Face

It is only when you see the bend of the coastline that you turn around to face the wind, to face whatever it is that you needed to go to a beach to face, or not face, to put it off just for a moment.

You begin by walking with the wind, jacket wrapped tightly about you, hair streaming in all directions, and the water roaring, simply roaring, and the rain stings your eyes, your bare ankles, as you hold your pants up so they don’t brush the ground, and you walk, your feet sinking in with every step, following footprints that are not yours, the heart shape of a palm pad, and four claw marks, sand pushed up between the negative space, you step around them, making your way away from where you started, where your shoes are gathering rainwater, it is only when you see the bend of the coastline that you turn around to face the wind, to face whatever it is that you needed to go to a beach to face, or not face, put it off just for a moment, before you can be a human being again, and you do face it, it presses against your face, this wall of wind, you outstretch your arms and brace against it, step by step back towards whence you came, you gather your shoes, and turn one last time to see the last of the light swallowed up by whatever’s next.

You can’t know whatever’s next — not yet. That’s the hard part of hoping, but you do have hope. You saw it in a dark, wide room, watching the way it is possible to stretch a thing out, be it through word, or sound, or sight, and make it wieldy, make it within the realm of reason for someone else to show — to know, to understand, no matter how heavy, how clunky. No matter how small it seems at times, no matter how small you have made this thing, folded up and over, upon itself and creased into a million smaller lines, the truth is that it’s not until you can look over each one, trace them there and back again, see where it is they fractured, and accept where they are, that this will get a little easier. But you are also going to be okay. No matter how long it takes, you are going to be okay

“Not a whit, we defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” — Hamlet, Act V, Scene II