Standing at the edge of dawn

 

Sunday, October 13, 2013

 

I go out to the sea, aching for a dawn that refuses to come.

Mists cloud my eyes with a gray I don’t have, but does not feel like day.

It is, rather, a fading out of darkness into light with no real distinction as to where one ends and the other begins.

I have to stop expecting easy definitions when life is more of an easing in and out than a swift and dramatic change.

Still day comes and I stand on the brink of the sea to welcome it.

I breathe in clean air my lungs only reluctantly accept, having borne too long the stifling air of the city.

We survive on such stale air because we must.

When all there is to breathe, we breathe it. Just as starving people settle for the least fulfilling fair. Something is better than nothing. Life is better than its alternative.

And sometimes, coming to the edge of the world like this, bearing witness to a place we might still consider pure, we get refreshed. And yet, we struggle to take a breath because we know we shall not breath so unwarily elsewhere, and must again resort to short breathes of impure so that we can continue and hope we might get back here to the break of day and the clearing skies again.

I stand and let the waves wash over my feet, even though the lingering moisture seeps down into my shoes with grit I shall walk with long after the day has dawned and I have moved on.

Perhaps this is a reminder that pure isn’t ads pure we might me believe.