" Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world"~ John Milton
So here I was, sitting on the edge of the river holding the papers between my fingers. Summer was coming, and the warm air brought the smell of you along with it. No longer a memory, but a part of the wind that will never go away any more than your breath on it. Small frogs peeped happily along the banks and I could hear the sound of your footsteps against gravel woven between them. A small twinge running along the inside of my palm as I felt the skin of your fingertips against it. Summer was here, and with it, everything that I knew of you that has made it was now and what it will always feel like to me. As though I was privy to a special sensory gift that others could not be a part of but that made my experience of it so much more meaningful. I thought to myself, "They do not know what they do not know".
I rolled the letter into a small tube and tucked it down inside the plastic bottle I had brought with me. A message in a bottle for someone else to know what I can not say, but need to have heard. Will it go where I wish it? I am not so sure, but it will touch someone. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or even a season from now, but someday. Maybe it will be read and tossed aside as useless, and maybe it will be enough to twist back inside the bottle to send along its way again. I didn't know or care. I simply needed to be heard.
The sun sparkled on the water and the breeze blew across the water turning the shimmering surface into another thought of her and how many times I had completely ignored the sunshine if it took away from what I thought of her at that moment.
I tossed the bottle into the water and watched as the breeze blew it out onto the surface of the water. It bobbed gently and then the wind took hold of its surface and pushed it toward the small spit of land that jutted from the side of the bank. For a moment, I thought that my attempts to send what I felt would be denied by the gods themselves. No sooner in the water to be driven back onto the sand to be rejected and forgotton.
I looked out across the water to a group of campers on the bank. Just a few men and women, seemingly unaware of each other but together, nonetheless. The men sat drinking beer while the woman stood around wondering why they were there at all if not for something they wished for themselves. A slight pang of anger for what I hoped they were not thinking of each other and another of jealousy, for my wish to be where they were now with someone else.
The small bottle seemed as though it was held static by an indecision it had made on its own. The breeze blew it against the sand, and the gods sat impartial for one brief moment to allow the water to guide it around the spit of sand and down the edge of the rocks further down the beach. Its first obstacle averted, it slowly drifted to the center of the water.
I sat watching it. Hoping that I was not just deluding myself with feeble attempts to feel her or that by spending my life in a lonely contemplation had somehow become a catharsis to which there was no ultimate solace at all. I missed her. More than anything else in my entire life I missed her.
The men on the beach had begun to argue about something and distracted me. One stomped away toward his tent while one of the women attempted to ask what was wrong. He barked at her and she recoiled visibly. So much for wishful thinking. Nothing like having your innermost pesimisms proven by an outward display of disinterest. She walked up the bank and sat on the rocks looking out over the water. The man grabbed another beer and walked away both from her, and his friends. As though somehow, the argument between the men had managed to be inflicted upon the two of them.
The small bottle, its top poking out of the water, drifted toward the reeds by his feet. I felt myself hoping for the second time in twenty minutes that Fate was not trying, once again to twist my thoughts away from me, by having this journey end before it even started. As though the very thought that I had a wish to express what I felt was enough to have yet another thing come up against me.
He looked out over the water and I watched as he watched the small minnows jump on the water. Something caught his eye and he looked down by his feet. His eyes locked onto the bottle. DAMMIT. I cursed the gods. I cursed Fate. I felt a rage boil into myself at being snubbed by everyone and everything.
He fished the bottle out of the water and looked at it through the green plastic. The cap spun off and I wondered if he realized that it hadn't even been a half hour before that it was screwed on. His finger poked into the top and carefully removed the pages inside. I sat watching him as though feeling that his expression would , once and for all, tell me that I was a fool to love at all. Tell me that everything I feel and know is a simple contrivance of my own pathetic mind and that no one else would even begin to grasp the desperation of it. Strike me dead where I stand here and now and show me that I have nothing. How does a man become judge,jury, and executioner of love for a woman? You put it into a bottle and stand before the anonymous bench like a man waiting to be condemned.
He read each page. Then turned it over and read them again. I won't tell you what was written inside but you have read it before. For just a moment, the whole lake seemed to dim. As though what he read had suddenly brought something into focus by making everything else blur. Sun and water, and rocks becoming nothing more than trivialities to what it was that suddenly awakened within him. What he had thought or known just 3three minutes before suddenly changed by a perception and an awareness he had no knowledge of. "You can not know what you don't know" I whispered across the water to him.
The man looked back up the rocks to the woman he had yelled at. Small and insignificant, even to herself, she was no more consequential than the rock she sat on. A footnote to a day. But suddenly he was aware that the blur around him did not affect her. Epiphany, like change, strikes on the wind, but it takes but a breeze to feel it.
He took the bottle and the paper back to the camp and then walked straight past the others who had already forgotten the insults to each other and were now building new grudges and insensitivities. He stopped by the truck and pulled out the cooler and rummaged to the very bottom. Past the beer he felt was so important before until he caught the edge of the berry coolers she had put in first. Not because he had, but because he had neglected to even consider what she wanted. Almost forgotten beneath the pile of beer.
He walked over to the rocks where she sat and handed her the cooler. Talking quietly back and forth, I could see the changes in her face. Anger, distrust, sadness, all of them rippling over her face like sheets on a laundry line. He handed her the bottle and then the pages from inside and she began to read. She read the same as he did and even turned them over just as he had. When she was done she nodded. Something they said between them caused her to nod again and again, and then he began to nod as well. Shared epiphany.
He leaned in to kiss her and then she handed the pages back to him. He shook his head and attempted to hand them back to her. No fighting this time, though. A conversation and a difference of opinion without the fear of judgment or retribution. Together they rolled the paper back into the tube and slid it back into the bottle.
She stood up on the rocks and looked out over the water. So much like him a moment before. So much like me two moments before that, and so much like the woman I loved did when I thought of writing this in the first place. The small breeze blew against her face and she hurled the bottle back into the water to be carried down past them again. As she did, she caught notice of me standing on the opposite bank. No words between us. Just a small smile.
"Mission accomplished" I thought to myself as I walked away from the water and climbed into the truck to drive home.
