6.22.2006

The Seeker

The bottle of clear green glass bobs in the wild ocean, smacked by whitecaps. The scroll inside grows seasick, wanting out, wanting shore. I reach from the sky and pluck the bottle from the sea, tossing it harshly onto island sand. I don’t know why I’m angry at the bottle. It’s never done anything to me.

The cork, completely saturated, wiggles free from the mouth of the bottle. It failed at its job, allowing a trickle of water to moisten the note within, black writing bleeding through to the underside of the paper.

I unwrap the scroll and lay it gently upon the dry beach. It stretches after its long confinement, extending invisible limbs, assuming its full form. I wait for legible words to appear, wanting the message, needing the message. Isolated words emerge as if written with cheap disappearing ink and later reclaimed with water in a game of play.

Hollow
Alone
Join
Become
Float

Pieces of a puzzle with no answer key. I’ve waited so long for my message - not passively but patiently - and here, when I thought it had arrived, it remains a mystery.

Whoever told you life should be fair? I was quizzed as a child. But even that harsh dose of reality didn’t kill my belief that universal justice would inhabit my life.

I close my eyes.

FIND ME. The words rise through the ink. My eyes open and I gently pass my right index finger over the letters, expecting them to smear into an indecipherable mess, but they remain. Calm. Clear.

Not another task
, I sigh. I want permission to just be. To be sought by life, not to be the seeker.

1 comment:

Emily said...

I love the line, "I want to permission to be. To be sought by life." It reminds me of this great poem called What We Want. It starts with a little kid being lost but I love the end, "After all, we all want our names called through the streets all evening; we all want to be lost and looked for, and found again and welcomed home in the smoky darkness on any summer night." -Maggie Anderson