Fall was quickly shedding its leaves, bending the knee to winter. I was still too young to realize how time worked; how you never ever got it back except, maybe, in memory-- but that only at the cost of more time, and never to the same effect. I think I was so transfixed by the future and so at ease with the present that I didn't realize how the past was growing, too, and there were many things which had to end in order for others to begin. All I know for sure is that I had the vague sense of something- something big- just on the other side of the horizon. And if I could only grow taller, run faster, live wilder, I might catch a glimpse of that wonderful and nagging thing which so deeply called to me.
Those were the days in which I learned conviction. How to plant it under my skin like a seed. How to nurse it.
I was always drawn to the sea. People would say that was my mama or papa in me, that attraction to the dark mournful Blue, but they would be wrong. (I learned quick how often people were wrong, and how upset they got when they realized it.) The love of the sea was mine, plain and simple. Everyone who loved the sea, did so in their own way. It was how we got a taste of infinity. (And, maybe, a good and rightful fear of it.)
It was not uncommon for me to be found by the ocean, letting the salt air buffet my thoughts like a flag. But it was uncommon for me to be there alone, or as close to alone as one could be with a bonded; Furfur kept his distance from me but he was always up there on the bluff, watching me like a mother. (Or, more accurately, like a dragon.) He didn't like the sand in his paws, called it unnatural. And he didn't feel what I felt, in the touch of the seaward breezes in my hair: the heavy promise of all those untold stories, streaming in from that secret place beyond the horizon.
I'm not sure how long I stood there. I know I was alone for a very long time, and then, suddenly, I was not. So I said, without turning my head, "Hello."
Holy ramble I am still figuring this girl out, please bear with me. Open to any <3
