Visions of the Ephemeral Purple Seascape

Destined to be ripped apart by storms, have washed over me in recent weeks and haunted my sleep.

I went to the kitchen for a coke and ran my finger over the pickle jar, filled to the brim with a reddish liquid, the ferric tang reminding me of my aunt in Texas who taught me the old ways, how to preserve perishable bounty in the form of pickles.

On her dining room table, beneath a tablecloth patterned with pink peonies, lay rows and rows of jarred hot water pickles.

There are occasions in my life when I feel this same mix of pleasure and pain; when I am propelled forward, cast into a new place that feels too far away, too unfamiliar, too formidable; and when I am suspended, unable to move forward or backward.

I feel the cogs of my brain rattling, being unable to remember the unspoken rules for navigating unfamiliar territory.

These feelings do not arise very often; it is in times of such profound and challenging change, when I feel afraid, lost, unsure, and uncertain of where I am headed, when I have no map to guide me through the muddied waters of human communication and language, when I am completely lost in the city that calls me home, that I yearn for that yellow folder that was once the source of such simple joy and simplicity.

Visions of the Seascape from the far east, on the Atlantean shores, a vision of a girl from far away calling to me.

Whatever it was, it had splintered, cracking under the weight of their collective souls.

The violet sea a pale moonlit bruise, dotted with the scattered heads of purple flowers.

The dream had ended there, its grace ruined.

She blinked into the dry heat and her vision blurred.

The sharp tang of salt from the ocean air triggered her memory.

Salty.

Beautiful.

She shivered with a deeper sense of remembrance.

And exhaustion.