Monday, June 24, 2019

High Tide

Photo Credit Julie Moore

I'm taking an online writing class this summer with teachers Robin Rice and Emily McDowell at https://www.bewhoyouare.com/ The writing prompts are pictures and we are free to write whatever we'd like to as inspired by the photo. Over the next few weeks, I'll post some of my homework. 

Here's what I wrote to go with the photo above:


Dearest Randall,
You’ve been gone eight days now. I’ve been gone three. If I could have willed my heart to stop beating, I would have. We can hold our breath, why not hold our blood from pumping? A flaw in the system.
I wore the hat you bought me in Cabo on our sixth anniversary and the disguise worked. No one at the shore knew who I was. Nor did they care, really.
Nobody was interested in my story until they found the old me, washed up on the sand. There were theories, of course. I had been standing on the jetty at high tide, taken by a large wave. I fell out of a kayak in the stormy sea. I took a swim in a vigorous riptide. The usual hypotheses. We know the truth. I walked backwards into the ocean and did not stop. The rocks lining my pockets had fallen out before they could become clues.
Even without this ocean, even in a dry, scorched desert, I would be gone by now. Baked in sun, dehydrated by hot wind, birds of prey circling me overhead, waiting. But as you know, I love the beach.
I don’t know what happens next. Maybe I’ll be reincarnated as a fish, or a mermaid, or a benevolent Poseidon, or even you.
Diana


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