Yellow Laughing

As I inhale I feel the dry, house air pass through my nasal passages and into my chest. This spiritless air keeps me alive long enough to contemplate my life, if only for a few brief seconds. I look down past my slumping chest at my forlorn toes as they rest upon the upholstered sofa. They nervously brush the perfectly burnished wood frame of the mission-style furniture upon which I appear captive. My feet look foreign to me, like I've never seen them before but I know that I have seen them in this light all too many times. I haven't seen them this way for nine glorious days though.

My breath is slowly swept back out into the room past my pursed upper lip. My bottom lip protrudes ever so slightly and feels the air trudge past. Again I look at the mission-style furniture and admire its wonderfully symmetrical design. Its squat yet formidable oak slats define the outer edge of my afternoon. My varnished oak perch contrasts magnificently with the driftwood I saw along the beach just forty-eight hours earlier. The weather worn wood enticed me to admire its unbridled natural beauty from all sides. Again I sigh.

The thought of beach sand melting underfoot makes me sigh. I miss the feeling of sand between my naked toes. I'm not concerned when an oceanside amble in firm sand turns to a calf cramping slog up a crumbling dune. I only care to know that there is no other place that I'd rather be. By the ocean I stand alive as the waves wash the sand from my feet. Behind my back the waves erase my footprints, thoughtfully and unceasingly stealing the past with each mysterious pulse. While I walk the tidal tightrope that is the shoreline, I marvel at nimble sandpipers jaywalking amongst the wavelets. I feel an infinite present in my future with each significant step. I wish that it would never end.

On a distant island lies a lighthouse I may never see. This is my future. It is beyond both my reach and control. My eyes return back to the sand. Always back to the sand.

Like the dunes that define the beach, my opportunistic self wants to shift through stormy and placid seasons. I want to be battered and pounded only to be caressed and bathed later. I want to be part of an ever changing landscape. I beg the wind and waves to take me somewhere. Anywhere.

A nomadic soul taught me a very simple life lesson on day eight of my nine day island vacation. He called it yellow laughing. He described being scared to death amid the towering waves, yet screaming with delight for an audience of one. He lived a fluid life free of paralyzing constraints. I listened and dined on the passion of his words. I was starving. Perhaps some of us need to be washed by fear to feel alive. I sit on a sofa in the tidal pool of life and watch the waves to my south, flanked by the shifting dunes to my north. The sand will bury me, the waves will drown me yet I'm intoxicatingly happy. I can taste yellow laughter on my tongue. I know it's at the end of my never ending dune.