The last day of vacation
carries curious emotional weight.
In a matter of hours
we’ll be leaving this temporary
paradisiacal home,
trading the ocean of the gulf
for the ocean of life
we made this short-lived escape from.
Fifty-one weeks of the year
we swim in that ocean,
albeit, in all its various currents,
sometimes bound to where it takes us,
a daily riptide,
sometimes to where it throws us.
Ocean waves don’t care
who or what gets caught in them.
But even though some movements are violent
and we lose our sense of direction
when the sun sometimes sets,
the chaos is not without comfort.
My heart has always found rest there
and it hardly ever joins me
on these week long excursions
from the realities of daily life.
Two hours spend in the physical ocean,
mostly alone,
have me dreaming of a future week
where she sits in the beach chair beside me.
I won’t ever want to go back home then.
Today, I’m counting these last hours
to returning to that imperfect ocean of life
made so worth swimming in
by the simple fact
that I can find her there.