Different Horizon (A Thousand Miles)

The water is warm and deep in the first rays of sunlight. Alone, the ocean seems like a whole world onto itself. The sun brings out sharp highlights to the water's gently frothing surface, and darkens the shadows underneath the light, running deep into the water.

My arrogance comes first: I slip it off as I would a shirt, and it falls alone to the sand. My pride and spontaneity follow, discarded somewhere closer to the waves. Last comes adoration, petty jealousy and ambition, violently thrown from my person and onto the ground.

Here I stand, naked--wonderfully so--feeling the ocean's wind tease my sleep-tousled hair and my tingling skin. I ignore the pleadings of the discarded clothes--alone, they are nothing and mean nothing to me--and instead face the inviting abyss before me.

I wouldn't allow myself to enter any other way. Those clothes stifled me, quietly choked me more often than not, and the warm darkness before me was no place to take such hindrances. I would enter with only myself to be judged and only my true strength to help me swim in the welcoming waters.

I say the water's warm, but it still bites me playfully as I wade up to my knees, then my waist, and soon I plunge headlong into the light and shadows. The water encircles me as if welcoming one of its own, and I immediately feel at peace.

I paddle along mindlessly, enjoying the feeling of the water around me and the power I only have, breaking the calm of the water with my wild strokes. I don't look behind me, nor do I look forward--my eyes open briefly once or twice only to glimpse an endless gray-blue.

It's only when my legs twinge slightly that I realize how long I've been swimming. I look back over my aching shoulder, expecting a distant line of shore past a sea of blue--but the shore is still there, looming like a goliath's shadow that I have yet to escape. And those clothes, like salt-covered bandages on open wounds, are waiting for me on the hard sand.

No matter how far I shoot, how hard I try, the horizon is still there mocking me. The ever-present shadow grounds me.

And just as I do every time, I consider staying the warm, deep water, and wrapping the presence around me like a blanket. To fall asleep pretending the shadow isn't behind me and my mattress the horizon, the ceiling the sky, is a beautiful lie.

But there's someone waiting for me, someone who's swam the waters before and almost drowned in them, and he's afraid to come after me and try once more, towards a new horizon. Even with me, he's afraid, and he refuses to even look at the water for more than a moment. It's more than I deserve, he tells me and himself, more than I could ever handle.

And without him my true strengths are useless, because I left my propelling force--my last thoughts, dreams, and aspirations--with him. He won't let go, because not only does he cradle me to himself as a child would a warm companion, I carry a few broken pieces of him in my pocket, and I won't give them back. Not until I find out where they go.

And so I turn around and leave the endless waters behind me and watch as my clothes are swept into the water by the greedy waves. I let them smother me and become me because they pull me back to the shore, but not matter how easily they wrap around me, when I emerge from the lapping waves they feel leaden.

I take your hand and ready myself to sleep again, but you take a hold on my goggles and slide them off of my sopping burgundy hair.

"You're soaked," you say lovingly and place a kiss on my forehead. Then you bury my goggles with shaking hands as I watch. There isn't a trace left when you finish.

You brush your hands quickly against your gray pants and take my hand again, tightly as if afraid, or exhilirated.

The race to swim a thousand miles has begun.