February82012
wind&sea
I do not know why, but the sea talked to me, just as the wind talked to my father. It whispered me with a voice too soft for its huge body, like a well-built man with a girly voice, and I listened. Just as my father did. He followed the wind wherever it went and I don’t have any idea what had made him settle down to start a family. But luckily enough, my mother had had it with the whole moving around thing and he took off one day, when I was eleven and my sister was three, and hit the road all by himself after that. When my sister began to ask the obvious questions; the where father had gone and why he never came back; my mother told her that he, being the wind himself, had gave us, his pollens, the chance to blossom up and continued his journey to help others. If you ask me, it was a pretty sick story to tell to a six year old, but she believed it nevertheless. Me? I don’t remember disliking anything more than that story as a child. It made me cry almost every night to think that father had finished it with us and was there to be the wind to other pollens.
I wondered time to time if it was me who made up all those conversations with the sea, due to my big father complex. But just like those painstakingly sweet moments one doubts herself to have assumed wrong things out of her soon-to-be-lover-boy’s behaviours, it faded away not long after. The sea talked to me, no doubt.
On early spring days, as I laid on the rock at the back of our house, I swear I could hear its footsteps slowly approaching me. Sea loved to play games, when I went close enough it would plant a wet kiss on my feet and back away right after. For the longest time, I feared to respond it, sea would talk and I would listen without any answers. I feared. It was a pretty childish thing to do; but the more I listened, the more I feared that one day I would understand father for leaving us, and worse, that I would find him right.
The first day I talked, was the day my first former boyfriend had decided to end things with me, telling me off and saying he didn’t need a girl who spent less time with him then a huge fucking hole filled with water. I felt defended, and angry. Defended; because of his words, angry; because the words I had resented were not the ones about me. To tell the truth, the moment he had asked to talk to me, I knew; on my way back home it would start. No. I wish to say it all began that day but it was much earlier, the first day I had let the sea speak. I knew, after realizing I was not on the phone nor talking to myself, people thought I was mental. I could predict what were to happen, on dinner table as soon as they had a chance to talk, they would say:
“Hey, you know what I saw today? A girl talking to the sea, can you believe it, she was talking to it as if she were talking to a human! How sick is that?!” and they would laugh, probably all by themselves, as others surely had better things to do than listening to that stupid story. I was aware of it all, but could I care less, the sea somehow made me feel at home, something I had failed to do ever since I was eleven. And nothing mattered other than that. We were bounded, just like father and wind, me and sea.
On days, when there was no wind in the air, when sea was as flawless as the sky, I would ask it about father. Just like wind, sea travelled around the whole world, so it had to know. But on those days, sea wouldn’t answer me. It was the only time it went silent, didn’t get angry at the birds which tried to steal away its children, didn’t get mad at the little ones throwing stones at it, didn’t show anyone its waves, not in the way a wild cat showed its claws; it just listened me as I blabbed about how it was having dad around. I was obsessed if you ask me, a little girl refusing to let go of her dad who had left them, but all along, it was more. I knew it because it was father who had made us meet. The day before he left, he had took me to the sea and told with an unreadable look in his eyes, a mixture of longing and regret as I would name it after, that I was like him.
“ Me and wind, you and sea, June.”
As I stepped in the water and walked further and further, that one memory played in my mind again and again. I had left the adult in me on the sea shield and let the little one take over. Allowing sea to surround me, to hold me I knew this was how it was going to be. Me and sea, father and wind. I would let it take my hand and bring me to father. I would let it have its way with me, just like father and wind.
Tags: /fiftytwo stories /creative writing /fiction /drabble /writing /sea /father and daughter /short story
