Stones Date Wednesday, April 24, 2024 - 02:31 PM PST Topic Entertainment The pavement smells distinctly of rain. In the sky, gulls screech. Though the sky is leaden, it has not rained for a long time. And if however faintly, the pavement has no right to smell of the dampness. And yet it does. In my pocket I finger a stone. It is oblong, rounded, smooth, carrying memories of a far removed sea. As big as my thumb, it fits perfectly into my palm. I pass the bench now; the bench where He used to sit. Every morning with his smile. His eyes. But never again. Memories and miles seal the coffin as well as death. If we knew now only what we would have known then. That doesn't sound quite right. Sometimes it seems to me the world works at random. If I were to twist back the key, rewind the world a couple months, and set it running again, this time. Space. Life would be gone, exchanged for one just as unexpected. Perhaps He would still be at his bench and I would be the one at the other end of a country. An ocean. Perhaps it would be He playing with this stone in his pocket, turning it now counter-clockwise, now clockwise... ...strange too, this stone, which I now push from one corner of my pocket to the other. It must surely have come from the sea. I can almost feel the sea in its grain, can almost smell the salt. I feel the impressions as I pass it between my fingers. If I took it out now and laid it bare on my palm, what color would it be? Green, grey, brown, or not quite something in between? Have I ever seen this stone? It has been in my pocket a long time. A long, long time and I can never remember having taken it out. It has become a vast boulder in my mind, presiding over the Romans as they built their roads, over the weeds that dissolve them, presiding as the mountains are thrust up only to return in failure…one grain at a time. Just have it out then, I think. Just have it out here under the morning sky and look at it and study the stone and toss it away and get on with things. And yet I can't. I can't take it out. I don't want to know the color badly enough; I don't want to see the pattern. Would He have taken it out? Would He have taken it out, looked at it, and thrown it in the air? Would he have laughed as he walked away? Would I still be afraid of the quiet that lives in the shadows when everyone else has gone? Would they be the ones walking insomniac nights listening to moths? The ticking of clocks? The gulls have no answer. They are gone now; I have no bread to keep them here. Perhaps they could no longer resist the ancient calls of the sea. It rises and crashes, rises and crashes, rises and crashes against a distant shore. It alone is not unpredictable. I too feel its pull, the gentle tug of the tides, and the vast forgiveness in its depths, the quiet certitude that would roll me around and then pull me down. For how long will I be able to resist? I grab the stone in my pocket, and roll those thoughts away. Now counter-clockwise, now clockwise, I turn. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=443