Zen

Days pass with me faltering. I walk around these streets, trying to feel nostalgia trickle through the wood work, but I fail. As though these streets were a whole other world than the one I loved and left. Even our regular bar, where we've spent countless drunk nights, fails to move me like I thought it would. (Like I thought it should.) I feel numb and decide not to ponder the meaning of all this until later.

But then I was awoken by my roommate's early morning plans, hours before our normal rising time, and I could tell immediately that something was different. There was sun.

After weeks of gray cold wind and news anchors leaping head-first into words like fall and change and over, a bright sunlight was making its way across the houses, the lush trees and glittering cars, and the entire world looked different.

Before I had rubbed the sleep--or, indeed, last night's mascara--from my eyes, I was on the 11, bound for the sea. The tram hadn't even reached its final stop when it came into view: blue, glittering, endless. I had to force myself not to run the last bit to the cliffs, and then, there it was: the ache in my heart that said This is where you belong.

The way the smooth rock warms up in the August sun. THe sound of the waves softly lapping against the shore. The cool breeze, the white sailboats. The smell of salt and kelp and the color of the sea.

The place was deserted; school had started, vacations long forgotten. I sat there in the near-silence; I was one with the earth. As my shoulders warmed in the mid-day sun, the water turned an even deeper shade of blue. I postpone my confusion a little longer; for this one moment, all is well, with the world.