The sea came to her sometimes in dreams. She had never known the sea, so at first the dreams were full of fear. She had been grown up in the full flat surety of Kansas, the only seas those of endless fields of tall green corn, whispering forever forward. Now she lived surrounded by ancient deserts, where each person was aware of the presence of water at all times: bottled, pooled, splashed, a precious liquid that no one could hold, no one could really be sure of.
In her dream the water flowed around her in great soft tides, warm and comforting, bathing her every crevice and hidden fold. And she was not afraid, but knew she belonged there, laying face down on the velvet beach, waiting to welcome the sea’s wetness, its tender suffusion, its nourishing touch.
Waking in the cool pool of sheets, gathered around her in heaps of silken ripples, she knew only her aloneness, her bed a mute soft friend, still and so distant from that warm shore she remembered.
But the day would pass away, and in the shadows of the starlit hours, she would hold her book and wait: wait to close the light over the page, wait until she could slip again into the depths, wait until the sea would come to her once more and she would join in its embrace, floating into its deepness, tenderly waiting for it to shimmer within her.
