The City in the Seashells

The tide of my feelings was receding. The sand was still moist from the touch of your waves. The sea shells of your memories were scattered haphazardly and I had decided to let them be instead of picking and collecting them like I used to. There were nights when my dreams carried my soul to the shore of your waves where I sat lone on the big dark-grey bumped rock of your love while my whites were soaked in the green moss of my disappointment in you. The sky was dark but cloudless and clear. I knew now that you would never come by. The glacial winds played a mockery at me as they settled on my bare shoulders, teasing me with slow penetrating stabs of jibes. There were no wounds but there was pain and the scars that their dagger inflicted upon me ran deep into my soul.

The waves were calm at the surface but I could sense the wild under current that I knew would, one day, submerge the city of my existence. The moon was flat and pale yellow like the sullen pages of an old untouched book that had gathered layers of dust overnight. The air carried a familiar smell of melancholy and I breathed it in and out without any prejudices as I had come to recognize it way too well now. The winds blew my flower imprinted white dress hence and forth like a dog tethering at it's owner and my mirrored sling bag that hung loose from my bare shoulder jingled, playing a clunter in the glory of it's contents. I watched them toss my desires as I saw my hopes fall hither tither but this time, I didn't run to gather them.

I continued to stay while I gazed at the north star shining bright beside the dreamy moon as the moonlight swam in a backstroke on the waves with an obvious but lazy kind of ease. The shore was vast, abandoned and lifeless. The sand was bruised with the footprints of the many forlorn lovers whose verselets once wreathed the sea in inscriptions like an emerald diadem but now only resounded completely in the memory of generations of sea winds as love lores. I could hear the song of the sea girls as it chorused at a distance. It was the kind of song whose rhythm could plunder a heart and when the tune stopped, everything would be quiet. 

I walked seawards towards the voices until I was soaked waist deep into the stillness of the moment. My feet dug into the red and brown reeds and dissolved into the sand like quicksilver. I conceded to the ebb and flow of the tides to submerge my existence into yours for the one last time. One by one, I pulled out the ivory colored sea shells I had preserved overtime from my mirrored sling bag. I touched them delicately to feel the smooth ripples of your design and the jagged rough edges. Each one of them had your name carved on it and so each one of them was oh so close to my heart and precious beyond words or value. Ever so slightly, I let them slip into the pallid hoops of waters that would float them to where they truly belonged - into the abysmal sea bed of my heart; where I had parked the bottles of my unsent confessions; where the sea girls penned and weaved their songs; where the remains of the wrecked vessels lay.