Where Man Meets the Ocean
By: Sarah Robertson
Tags: Short Story, Nostalgia, Oceans, Fantasy, Fiction

I was looking out beyond the docks when I saw her. Sea-salt air sat becoming froth on my tongue and the wind knotted my hair as I listened to the wooden boards beneath my feet creaking to hold my footsteps. At first, I thought it was just the sun in my eyes, the breeze bringing up tears, age turning my vision milky. Anything to distort the sea for just a minute. Just long enough to turn seafoam and the horizon into the shimmering glimpse of somebody, of something, out there.

It was a slow walk to the shoreline. I liked to think the speed robbed by old age belonged to someone else now- but I knew, like everyone else, it was gone. When my feet hit the sand, I stretched with my hand pressed to my brow to look again. She was still there, peering out from the waves. Leaving my footprints behind me, I reached the edge of the water, letting it kiss my toes on its way to the shore. There, I waited.

I watched the water slip aside for her to draw closer. A sudden hush swept across the beach. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the wind quieted it’s roar, and the waves silenced their crash. Even the sky fell a little bit, the sun sliding it’s evening-dyed pink and orange fingers through her hair, trailing behind her in the surf. Still, I waited, listening to the quiet like a sermon, letting the air and the salt wash over my body until I was clean.

“You’ve aged.” said the angel arisen from the sea.

“Well, yes,” I said, “that’s what happens when the years go by.”

She smiled, reaching out one hand to trace the creases marking my eyes, “You’ll have to forgive me- I forget sometimes.”

“I know.”

“Has it really been so long? I loose track of the weeks.” Her eyebrows furrowed as she pushed steadily greying hair behind my ear.

“I know. I don’t blame you- there’s been too many to count.”

“Yes, but-” She fumbled, “I didn’t remember how you humans are so ruled by time. You fall apart so quickly.”

“I don’t mind. Better to age quickly than to never age at all.”

She came to sit beside me and and we watched as the ocean swallowed the sun inch by inch. Mostly, I watched how the changing light eclipsed her face, imagining it was years catching it up to mine.

“I’ll see you sooner next time,” She promised when the hour came for her return to the sea, “We won’t let the years pass us by.” She slipped the water on like second skin and I watched her disappear into the foam. That was easy for her to say- I only had a handful of years to watch pass.

I stared out across the ocean for a long time that night. When I was younger, each time she left, I’d yearn for a day where she’d love like I did. The way those of us with only a short lifetime of seconds to savor do. I wished she’d love the kind of love I knew so well, the kind of love that makes you sit by someone’s side, just waiting too grow old together. The kind of love my parents had, that sat hollow in my chest the summer I lost them, singing something ghostly and begging to be released. That summer, I fell off the helm of my fishing boat into the ocean, and didn’t try to swim. The watery arms that I expected to drag me into the depths instead pushed me to the shore.

Sometimes, I would even wonder if there was a love she wished I could feel. A love that sweetened all the sour of moments lost. A love that reminds one of just how small you are next to the ocean, and that it will never part for the surface and the floor to touch for long.

When the stars began to retreat back into their hiding places, and the sun stretched lazily into the sky, I made my slow retreat away from the water. Finality sank into my bones as I looked back one last time, just in case she was looking back across the sea for me.

Perhaps when she comes back, some many seasons from now, it will finally be her turn to wait for a lover long gone.