When I open my hand, sand pours forth, meeting the sand already at my feat. I look out over the wolf-blue ocean. The waves seem to move too quickly, but somehow it makes it all the more realistic. I have found a new place to be alone. The ocean and the sand and the salty breeze and the tepid sun. The sound of breaking waves and seagulls crying. The quiet hum of sand blowing across sand. Natural. Pure. Wholesome. Serenity.
I hear a breath behind me. Even out here, he's found me. I guess there's no respite from my feelings. I can feel the tears, hot behind my eyes. My breath is warm in my throat, caught there behind a million unspoken declarations of affection. I want to tell him how I feel. I want to ask him if he feels the same way. I want him to feel the same way. I am going to tell him this but at the last minute my mouth betrays me. It speaks a reference to a past conversation, one he probably wouldn't remember.
"Once you let God into your heart, he is always there." He looked at me so meaningfully, it had to be true. My mind raced at the implications of his words. What do they really mean? Thousands of calculations played through my head. They overwhelmed my ability to process information and I just sat there dumbfounded. It must have looked so ridiculous.
"Are you like God then?" I ask over the crashing waves. "Once I let you into my heart, you never leave it? Even when I am alone with my thoughts, you will be there?" The dam breaks, the great torrent of salty tears stream noiselessly down my face as I stare impassively out into the unfathomable depths of a make-believe sea.
I look around at him, pleading with my eyes for an answer, only to find that he is smiling at me. "That's love."
"No." My voice is oddly powerful, it even surprises me. "This can't be love. This uncertainty, this unrequited adoration, these feelings of helplessness. These things can't be love."
The waves freeze over behind me. The sand beneath out feet grows hard and cold. The very air around us drops a good thirty degrees. I stare into his eyes though my vision is obscured by a snow that has started falling out of nowhere. Still his smile is as unmoving as cement. I force the world to change again, plummeting the temperature another thirty degrees. He starts to shiver, but his smile is as pacified as ever.
I stare deeper into his eyes, lost in the emerald and evergreen pigments. His oddly shaped nose, his irregularly large lips, his oddly blockish face. What about him is so attractive, so compelling? It's not his bushy eyebrows, or his dorky hairstyle. I stare into his eyes again. I am reminded of Jade. A jade summer. I stare at him and he stares back at me, and the truth breaks on me like the frozen wave behind me that wasn't able to.
Around us an explosion takes place. The permafrost beneath us explodes into grass. The frozen ocean explodes into a hill. At the top, a solitary tree explodes into being. Without a word, we climb to the top of the hill. We stare out over the lake that has always been there, and the mountains that stand as resolute as they always do. To our right is the forest, as rooted to the ground as they always have been. And to our left is the vastly unexplored terrain, still as mysterious as our hearts have always wanted it to be.
I open my eyes, and reality hits me in the face like a cold torrent of wind on a frigid winter's day.
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