It was the wind.
It was the wind all day and all night too.
We were edgy.
It was the wind making us edgy. Edgier
than usual. More restless
than usual. No one
could sleep waiting
for whatever the wind would bring.
First, the smell of the sea.
A whiff.
We had never smelled the sea before.
But it was so obvious, we knew.
Salt. Brine.
It was only bits of the surface of something
bigger, something vast, whipped up, frothed,
taken up by the wind.
We tasted it.
Branches crashed down among us
tossing confetti leaf prayers to the wind.
The power went out.
We couldn’t look at each other.
We didn’t know how to say it —
what excited us about the taste of the sea,
how dangerous it was.
Without saying anything, we each knew we would leave.
In a way, some of us had left already.
A few stayed.
The rain would come hard with wind like this.
We could play at self-sufficiency.
Grinding coffee beans by hand,
boiling water on the barbecue,
inventing goulash from what began to melt in the defrosting freezer.
New card games in the ghost lights of the camping lanterns,
new stories in the old candle light to save batteries,
new bodies under the covers in the dark
excited by what we didn’t know
by the vast reservoir of the sea
by what we couldn’t say to each other about how scared we were.
The reservoir of the unknown sea that pushed and pulled
tides we shared in our bodies. We could feel it
rising inside us, flooding
the shores, spilling into each other
bringing the crabs and little fish that would be stranded there
drying in the sun long after the storm had passed
long after we had forgotten about the wind
forgotten about the ones who left.
Long after we had forgotten, we shimmered each to each,
this us now, the dissolving light of rainbows left behind
when they shed their sunlit scales.