“Someone I never will know”
by Gemma Rowe
The lifeguard stands are overturned,
And the sand no longer bites my feet.
There is only gentle humming beneath them.
The sky has deepened,
And now folds itself into
The stark blue of the waves.
Jagged rocks form together
Into a man-made wave breaker,
And the white clouds
Are the only colors besides blue
A painter would need
To capture the scene.
A boy, or perhaps a man,
Has scaled the spines of these stones,
And perches upon them like the screaming seagulls do.
I was not there for his journey to reach them,
But I notice him now,
Hunched over,
As white foam splashes behind him,
Creating a blossoming outline of his body–
An encompassing halo.
I catch his eye for a moment.
He seems lost on those rocks.
He has gained what he set out to achieve,
But perhaps the satisfaction
Has slipped into the sea below,
Or fallen through his hands
Like the countless grains of sand.
I am the sole person observing him
From the safety of the shore
But the only noise heard is the exhale of the wind.
He is triumphant and timid.
The difference between us lies in familiarity.
He sits on those rocks,
And I imagine he knows this place far better than I.
I see him growing up on these shores,
Climbing those same rocks many times.
Maybe if I were born here, like him,
If I knew the splinters on the boardwalk,
the texture of the sand,
Mastered the art of the tides’ relentless push and pull, I, too, could scale the rocks.
He has descended now,
returned to shore,
disappeared from my view.
And I’ve lost interest in who he is,
The same way someone loses interest in a dream
After it has faded from their mind.
Now this person,
this man,
this boy,
who will do many things,
Will dissolve from my memories
But an echo of him
on those rocks,
with the crashing waves still reaching out towards him will remain.
A fragment
for someone he will never know.
