Escape Velocity
With more effort than any of us thought would be required, in one final heave we pulled our launch out of the shallows and onto the flats at the start of the windswept and mossy littoral plain. A similar herculean strain — this time solitary — was necessary to release ourselves one by one from the muck after that collective effort to free ourselves from the sea at this point in the decelerating kinetic line of our lives, just as we had each labored to free our selves of our pasts. Slumping onto the hull to catch my breath — the view — forward and back and above us was — as were so many now forgotten views spied along this way — breathtaking. Flossy cumulus silently provided occasional cover over scolding gulls above us in darkening Cerulean skies.
Like the undulating waves perpetually above and under us in our movement up to this time — even with no destination in mind — we could not have been truthful to say we were lost. An ample supply of maps and expertise offered through providence, tutored practice and imagined adventures rehearsed in each of our youths, allowed us to know our place at any point in time — points documented by the collected pinpricks left when we chose to mark them in those maps we had now left behind, under the glowing Ultramarine and Alizarin-tipped clouds of slowly approaching night, in the boat at anchor in the bay.
In thrall of living this very moment forgetfully free of the pools and eddies of our abandoned pasts and without anticipation for any next point in this ongoing life-line — as has been our habit through the long forgotten points in our own widely-spaced pasts that without prompt shifted to the present as we struggled to cross the beach and crest the barrier dunes — who among us could know that as we passed that suddenly porous Rubicon we would find before us under the faint light of stars rising in the waning day, each of those pasts lined up, glistening and impeccably manicured on a prototypical suburban cul-de-sac, as if ready for a Sunset magazine cover photo shoot. And from the suddenly familiar smell of barbecue, we were just in time for dinner.
I — for one — was not prepared for this.
