Casting Adrift

 I was walking along a windy beach listening to Elvis Costello:

Life is dark
Cold as the sea
Embrace me in my anguish
Put seaweed in my hair 
and vow that you won't cry because
I've gone 


I have walked along there so many times and perhaps I will walk there forever. And while I was walking, I revisited a thought that I have had so many times recently. That is I think you know me now as well as you ever will.

On those hot summer days you will know that I still yearn for the cooling sea; to cast off my clothes and throw myself into the waves.

On these colder winter days you will know that I will be brewing my coffee over a driftwood-fired stove.

I am starting to repeat myself. I feel that I have nothing new to say. I think that this will be the last message that I will send from this shore.

Remember me fondly. I will still be here; a man of simple pleasures and modest expectations.

I will never ever forget you.

Cusp

I love the nomenclature of the beach. Cusps are the arcs of deposited material spaced regularly along a wave washed beach. I love them for their steadfast regularity; they are my waymarkers as I walk along the edge of the water.

I have also reached a metaphorical cusp and I stand here on the divide between the warm comfort of everything that I know and what might lay beyond. If I stay here I will be comfortable but unhappy. But could I find the contentment I seek anywhere else than here? I feel that I am shutting down, quietening and living more within my thoughts at the moment. I am a mechanical; I go through motions. I feel but do not want to feel.

Nevertheless, I am taking my small pleasures where I can find them. A pot of coffee steams on the stove and there is the aroma of fresh bread. Music plays and I polish a lovely smooth pebble between my fingers.

I am still very much alive.