Pale Shell

Waves in my ocean are like winter's snowflakes. Every one is a different story, a new breath of the sea with its own laugh, its own rise and fall. Each one will strike the sand, will end itself in a different way. Like timbers they fall, their peaks never having felt in an entire lifetime the solidness that is the ground. And even in falling every single wave will come as nothing before it has. It will fall like silk, tumble like a giggling toddler, or even strike like lightning, the thunder riding its tail. And then they pull out, they dig white fingers into the sand and drag back out in streaks or handfuls the grainy shore. And every second they come in the thousands, in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands along my beach. In one day out here they have spoken with the earth of a lifetime of things. They come and they go and there is nothing a man can do to stop them. Only watch or run out into them and feel them rush across his sun-brown back. And standing in the waves he feels the heartbeat of the world, the heave and the sigh that is every crest and every trough. This is Time. How else does it make sense? And as time comes, as it goes, beating against the ground, there is a miracle underneath. As every wave draws back from the shore there is always a moment when the water is perfectly clear, when the froth is gone and, looking down, you can see the shells. And it is these that take our breath away. Every man reaches for them. Every thought of staying dry is gone, every precaution we took so carefully is over; making sure the pants were rolled high and the t-shirt pulled up, keeping our feet dry to keep away wet sand, it is all gone. Because every man knows instinctively somehow that the shell they have seen, the one that has taken their breath away and sent it tumbling with the waves, she will only be seen once in a miraculous moment when time has stood as still as it ever will. And looking at that exact moment in that exact spot on this infinite beach he has seen her. A moment later and she will be lost. A moment earlier and she isn't even there. 

So here I am with the sun on my skin, with the sand against my legs, and with the sea chuckling around me like a thunderstorm. And looking down, in that one moment in the wave, I have seen a shell so wonderful that all I can do is bend my knees and hope in blind faith that my hand can find her. And as the sky turns the color of burnt and bleeding roses it looks as if that pale shell is on fire with the setting sun, glimmering with a life brilliant and dangerously beautiful.