Sea foam and Mortality

The poetry of sea foam is one I had not personally encountered before, not outside of the context of fables like that of Hans Christian Anderson. I don’t know what it was about the concept that left it feeling impossible outside of my imagination or even just outside of a sunny beach in the Caribbean, probably some combination of associating the ocean with warm weather anyway as well as knowing that just looking up the color results in pages of light green splashing across your page. The hard wall of life meeting the speeding car of imagination left me astounded on a windswept winter beach as the choppy waves of the Atlantic methodically pushed clumps of what would otherwise be mistaken as soap suds up and down the sand.

They were beautiful in a way I was accustomed to in other contexts. It reminds me of frost in November, quick to burn off once the sun crests the horizon but a dazzling display of minuscule diamonds if you’re lucky enough to be up to see it. The curve of the bubbles sent rainbows spinning in the air to be snatched away by the bright cold sun. Brushing against a clump would send it careening over the waves, pulled away by the wind to dissolve into clouds or land in the white caps and rejoin its inception. 

The simplicity of what I found captivating held me, leaving me strangely hollow. There were people dotting the sand, my own family equally bundled strolling through the asteroid belt of shells left at the tideline. No one cared to notice the foam. None of them would remember it when the inevitability of time claimed it and cycled it through the air again. Would I notice? In a year or ten, will I care enough to remember the delight I felt and the wonder that pierced me as I saw a side of the ocean I had never before had the chance to appreciate? 

Probably, but how much of that fond nostalgia will be organic and how much will it stem from me choosing to write about it, a full 24 hours later with the events of the rest of that day to color something blank?

We walked alongside the dunes until we crossed over them back to the calmer mud flats of the sound side of the beach. There were tracks in the sand leftover from the retreating tide, black marbled patterns that I could only assume were a combination of silt and death, the antithesis of the clean folds of air I had been playing in. The ebb and flow of something stationary, marred only by the pressed footprints of things only marginally more alive. 

There was a triad of horseshoe crabs, thoroughly picked through and consumed by the birds that wheeled overhead on the calm side of the beach. The blue blood of these creatures whose fellows had contributed mounds of knowledge and sacrificed their lives for human medicine landed unbidden at the forefront of my mind as I tapped the hollow shells and admired the elegant curve of their bodies. Would they live on in the lives of the creatures they had fed? Or would they too fall too soon and live on by themselves in the memory of the earth? What was the point of knowing how good they were for the betterment of society of these beasts themselves ran the risk of their corpses being desecrated by the uncaring hands of my siblings or children ten years their junior?

If I fell off a cliff, would anyone care about me in decades if they came across the bones I left behind? A ridiculous thought to be honest, a human skull in the middle of nowhere has a tendency to elicit a manhunt at the minimum or spark an urban legend at the most. I would feel lucky if something in my untimely life or long demise left me to wander in the minds or pages of others as a memory or a story. 

I am neither so impermanent as sea foam nor as eternal. I may be stardust, but my earthbound heart and unforgiving mind struggle to reach for the heavens that they came from. I may not leave behind more than a sagging compilation of tissue and nutrients best appreciated by some extant form of life, but I would hope my words could find purchase on paper, delicate as even that may be.

Life is so messy right now and there is so much to shadow my gaze. I have no choice but to dream of simple pleasures. To wish for more is to invite pain.