A Sweet, Soft and Beautiful Dream

Was it all just a sweet, soft and beautiful dream?

Was I just sitting with my body arched to the sun, painting warm rays of light across my body, brushed with a bronze glow on both my skin and heart?

Was I just surrounded by the solitude of strangers, seeking comfort to burrow myself in anonymity, slinking through their skin to see into their souls, stories full of hope and hard work and the cracks and crooked lines they walk to find a place in this world?

Was I just so full of blood, heart swelling with my family and the love that radiates in every smile, every twinkle caressing our eyes, every touch of fingers that laced together in the quiet moments of a day slowly settling into night?

To watch the waves roll into one another was to break away from my body and become the spray of salt that licked the air among the blues.

To slide my bare feet into the grains of sand that led me to the edge of the world and freed me from the constraints of my mind was to run upon the clouds without hold of a hollow pavement.

To laugh, deep and wild and bright from my belly, was to understand what had been missing as a part of me.

I was so full with my family, so comforted, so secure and natural and happy. I was genuinely at peace, radiating a sense of belonging and wishing for a suspended eternity. With my family, in a state where the sun shines on all the day's corners and curves,  I holed myself up in a shimmering reality that came and went as transparently as the dusted sunset that breezed over palm trees and silence.

A cool, sharp river running away from the familiar, away from the fresh, clear rain that dropped along the pool's edge, soft and warm and massaging on my skin. I was sinking into the simple spray of water that curled into the edges of my hair. And in a charcoal swept evening curtain, drops dissipate into a black ink that stifles the air, breaks hard in the rest that swaddled me.

I do ache, a dull throb that ebbs and flows through me like the sea I dreamt about so many lifetimes before. And these longings that pried me open and scraped beneath my chest pour like vinegar in my wounds. I was surprised by joy, and terrified when it left me, washed when my poolside lounging launched me back between four walls, bundled up and bent over a desk.

Florida seems a distant memory. Flickering in florescent light, not quite a shadow, more than an apparition. I am alone again. I am forlorn and forgotten in a sun that rises once more on the pure and wide eyed morning. Waiting once more for that call of the cyan sea. For the rain that sings a song into the damp, slow sky. For the hearts of my loved ones to curve once more into mine.