Red Room Where the Writers Are

The young girl with a wheaten plait running down her back intersects my view of the sea. Clad in a pink bathing suit she clip-clops through the shore line like a young pony. Now and then she stops to inspect the jewels of the sea, a coral shell, an exotic piece of sea grass. When she writes her name in the sand she is unaware of the encroaching tide. I watch her from my safe place further up the strand. In a sense I am photographing her, trying to capture her freedom in my lens. When she dashes to the side of the beach where the sun is beginning to sink she becomes but a mere outline, a silhouette that blends in with the jagged collage of rocks and the lichen coated grave stones over the crooked walls  beyond in one of the fields.

I rise then and walk to the sea. I am trying to loosen the knots in my mind. I walk into the cold water until it reaches my breasts.  I plunge in and swim out until I meet the clarity I seek. I lie on my back and look up at the sky. Sated, I close my eyes, splayed limbs, loose and dangling. Is this what the young girl feels? Is this what I have forgotten?

I think how light can change everything. Your perspective depends on it,  yet, sometimes, the light one perceives can either help you see more clearly or it can be so deceptive, so glaringly bright  that it can cloud and distort what is really out there, what is waiting to be grasped.