The grey clouds
The grey clouds filled in from the horizon to just beyond the breaking waves out from the sand. I could see the rain draped across the water turning it from black to grey. The sky was hot white over the sand and the city. I scanned from the north to the south and slowly back then again. Two slender white hands surfaced out of the black water near the shore buoyed in clutches of foam. The tide was receding. I had watched it pull away from my stocking feet. Long colourless hair swayed out of the blackness forward flowing between the hands. Should I show alarm. I was still alone. Faces bring people. Her paper white hands let into bare arms and the billowing sleeves and shoulders of a soaked blue dress. I had started looking at still things to feel myself disappear as those things became real. I gave myself over to the real presence of the things in my apartment. When I had real time I filled it with that transferral. I had watched things and come back to them over and again to find the bits of myself I had given over to them until everything I knew was contained in other things. That is how I had produced this moment. I had watched the sky without the ocean but knew the ocean was there, behind all of the buildings and reflections. The sky was easy to watch changing. Even full of storm clouds it was the emptiness that allowed me to be isolated. I felt myself coalescing when I couldnt see all of those divergent vessels. If all that I am balanced between the sky and the stacked and ordered debris in my apartment then there was nothing to catch the day on but a new sky or new things. I didnt want to let her rise up out of the water. Where would it all go. I have stored so much in compartments and stacks that this errant instant which I had prepared for myself wouldnt fit. I wont let myself see her stand up off of her knees in the soft sand and walk up into the sun and the white sky.