one long swim

crescendos, rising, falling, sinking memories, sinking notes. bottles on the ocean, we write love letters to a world we only thought we used to know. living as ghosts in other people’s reveries, we walked like them and talked like them, danced like them and loved like them. we lived in their cities and we wore their clothes; there were colors, there, or so we thought. and who could blame us? no one ever tells you there is more than you can see. we were happy, there, in our way.

and then came the day when we went to the beach.

and perhaps it was the wind, but we saw the dead pelican mangled in the seaweed, and it spoke to us. it called us by name, slow and quiet, and it whispered familiar words in languages we didn’t know we knew, and the sand spun beneath our feet. we were seized, possessed, by worlds unknown and unforgettable, and the pelican spoke louder, we could feel him in our blood, singing every heartbeat for us. and what he said was, slow and hollow,

one long swim, that’s all it takes. one long swim.

and we stood on the edge, the water just brushing up against our toes, and we took off the clothes our mothers gave us. children we were, of apple juice and guns, and we put our glasses down and dropped our pistols in the ocean. we left them there, on the sand, and peered into the horizon’s shimmering, imaginary line. like a mirage, it was. one long swim, we thought out loud, one long swim.


and so we swam. into nothing we could know, toward nothing we could see, we swam into the currents and the kelp and the sky. tasting the salt on our lips, breathing heavy and more desperate than either of us would care to admit, we hurtled toward the nothing as if we knew its name. as if we could smell it, taste it somewhere in the back of our minds, like a blurry memory just beyond reach.

one long swim, that’s all it took. and now, now we write love letters to the people we left behind, asking them to visit sometime. asking them to look up at the sky, sometime. we don’t know if they get our bottles. we don’t know. but we send them anyway, a daily ritual of something kind of like love and something kind of like show-and-tell, something like a whisper in the night that you tell yourself is just the wind in the trees. it’s nice here, we say. the colors are different, and we don’t have costco, but you can wear a funny hat anytime you want, and when it rains the trees like to swing dance. it’s nice here, you should come visit. and really, all it takes is one long swim.


crescendos, swirling compasses, we rise and fall with the waves and we listen to old radio shows. these are days of long nights and longer mornings, days full of juice and empty of promises, days of things unknown and unforgettable. we are, now, unknown and unforgettable.

we are, now, here and there. in the sun and out to sea, alive, and just around the corner.