When I Float

Sometimes when I lay on my board, usually early in the morning, I let swell after swell pass under me, lifting, lowering. I watch the two or three other people out there paddle to catch their waves, to write their twisting, turning names on the the face of each. They paddle back my way in a few minutes, exhilarated. They may have found something unlike anything else on that ride. Something like the speed of thought. Something like the spark between heartbeats.

At the pulse rate of quiet, I let swell after swell pass under me. Drifts of kelp splotch the surface like hair. A jellyfish has brushed up against me more than once in these moments. I never get stung.

What I’m thinking about is the bar of sand or shelf of rock deep beneath me, and the gentle sand sharks meandering just a few inches over it, in and around waving grass. I’m thinking about the slope of the ocean floor steepening as it nears dry land, and the growing turbulence under a forming break, and how the force, the fraction of the moon’s force in a wave, comes to meet the end of the inclining sea floor and is both defeated and completed at the shore.

Then I begin to wonder if this entire motion lives inside me too. The intricate call of one muscle to the other. The urge to spill out of myself. The answer I give back to the moon.