Storm surge imminent

Heaviness pervades at the transition between land and sea in the time preceding the event horizon of an impending winter storm. A restlessness pushes onshore with each high tide enveloping the sand, testifying to its own largesse, tossing every manner of matter about, and only increasing the weightiness of the rising notion in me, nothing lasts forever.

Low tide, on the sand, the wind whips a steady rise and fall of precipitation from a churning steel blue overcast. A cold water mask accumulates on my face, first droplets, then streaming, eventually dripping from nose and chin in a cascade.

Every direction on which I fix my eyes, a tenuousness in all things vividly presents itself. An aged rock protruding from a puddle in the sand, cannot hide having been worn over an incomprehensible expanse of time and exposure. A massive, twisted remnant of an ancient tree trunk lies beached, exposing an experienced skin, the product of having traveled far and wide on the water, and a portent of a longer journey still.

Shifting my gaze landward, at the base of the bank, where the sand encroaches on the land, a zero-sum game for survival hangs in various states between transiency and arrest. A skeletal frame of Queen Anne’s Lace strikes a figure in repose among the thicket and thorns. Nine heads, now only a muslin colored legacy of the previous season, stretching skyward still, awaiting deliverance from an unrelenting tension. In it all, a constant chaos, in delicate balance unfolds, at least, …until it does not.

An aura of inevitability arrives on the wind, ruffling open an as yet uncluttered page of cerebellum, and laying bare a foreboding there. The aged rock, the travel-worn tree trunk, the Queen Anne’s Lace locked in struggle, all in seeming perpetuum, like the oscillation of atoms in perfectly predictable cadence. Looking over my shoulder, the incoming tide is at work erasing evidence left of my existence on the sand. I cannot look away, and there lies the crux of my burden. How long before a tipping? How sweeping the redrawing of this particular incarnation of land and sea? How fine the lines between indifference, ignorance, and the folly of self annihilation? What does it really matter, remaking this tiny speck? All of these and more go unanswered, and in full recognition, I am my own share in the problem. I look to a gray horizon with squinted eyes, using one hand to shield my face from what is now a driving rain relenting, nothing lasts forever.

Let the surge come what may.