Sand Castles by the Sea

The first that struck was of tumultuous force, tumbling over my entire being. I’d lost my footing as it crashed over me, knocking the wind out of me and dashing my fragile vessel against the jagged edges of the rocky shoreline.

Stunned beyond tears, with its

overwhelming strength, it had taken me as a rag doll and tossed me, emptying me like a boat, capsized in the perfect storm; stripped bare of all its belongings, submerged and sinking to the bottom of an abysmal depth. All of me lay scattered across the endless abyss that engulfed me. That became me.

I finally caught my breath only to heave as the flood of emotions began to careen throughout my body. My mind was awash with a mixture of fear, denial, anger, sorrow, and confusion. Nothing was deeper, though, than the distance that had now separated us for all of time to eternity. I drowned in the absence of him; in the nothingness that life became, empty of his love to surround me and wash over me.

I looked around to find pieces of my heart and soul, tattered and floating like wreckage atop the blue. My sole identity bobbed in the pitch black deep like a lone buoy.

Alone.

Cold.

With no land in sight.

Tears began falling to overflowing. Slowly, their ebb and flow came in waves that were high and low; moving me about the vast loneliness and flowing the lost pieces of my self back toward my being. I collected the fragments as they drew near me, but gullies of

grief had washed out and eroded the banks of my heart. Cavernous spillways were full beyond what they could contain. I was drowning in the bitter tides of pain and unspeakable heartache.

At times, the storm clouds gathered to tempests that struck without notice. At other times, the colored sky and position of the sun, read like a sailor’s prediction and storms would arrive right on schedule. The grief never ceased. It was ever encompassing and falling upon me all at once.

I drifted, afloat, as the natural course of time and emotional healing washed me closer and closer to the shoreline; back to where I was before, but before would not be back where I was.

As I found myself nearing the edge of the separation between the depths of sorrow and the shores of sadness, I glided past the once jagged rocks that had battered and bruised me years before. The many tears I’d cried had washed over them and smoothed them to polished stone. They were there as a monument, like a gravestone, but could no longer inflict the same pain they once had.

I stood at the edge of the shore and gazed at the horizon; its dividing line upon the deep sapphire body where I had been immersed and the lapis-lazuli heavens, above, where he was. My feet slowly sank into the sand that was still warm from the late summer sun and I emptied myself dry. Tears streamed down my cheeks creating rivers in the sand. I gathered the tear soaked sand and I built, for myself, a sand castle on the shore of the grief that had once swallowed me alive.

A tune began to rise like a river, cleansing to my soul, and I sang as I dared to rebuild, there, at the once was, alongside the eerie deep.

“I live in a castle fortress

on the edge of the ocean, deep

and I know that someday tides

may come

and wash me out sea.

But ’till the waters rise again

and call me out to grieve

I’ll live each day with all I have

in my castle by the sea.”

Sometimes, still, my tears tear down my castle walls, but my foundation remains and I rebuild it again as I remember his love that filled me to overflowing.