Bringing Rocks Home From the Beach

My friend is moving </3

clouds at the beach. once I got the rocks my hands were too full to take pictures (duh)

Bringing rocks home from the beach is a habit that I will not break.

For one, because why should I have to? What’s it to you or anyone if my apartment is filled with small smooth stones? And pieces of shells too?

I become like a caricature of greed when I see them resting, slightly nestling in the jewel cushion wet sand. Velvet.

I can’t find a piece of sea glass to save my life. I’m too busy getting hungry about the stones. A sea siren whisper that makes my fingers tingle. I am convinced, some primordial part of me is convinced, that these shiny things are valuable. That I should be picking them up. Plucking one after another until they spill out like fat raindrops from between my fingers.

I like in particular the small white ones that seem like perfect little disks, but really of course aren’t, which is okay. Sometimes I like a black stone, a void, but that depends entirely on shape. Only if it’s very flat and very oblong.

My favorites are the ones that are roughly the size of a small egg—brown, or beige like an egg too—but that look orange when they’re fresh and wet. I like these best in part because their beauty is so temporary, so dependent upon the shine of the salt and the air and the everything else that’s at play when they’re sitting in the sand at the tide line. They begin to fade the moment you pick them up, and for a reason I can’t quite identify, that makes me addicted to them.

I don't care much for the shells to be honest—unless I can find a nautilus that’s mostly intact because God is real.

I also do like the pieces of shells that have purple, real purple, on the inside side. The resemblance to a bad bruise on pale skin is striking. Those ones make me feel so tender, so I pick them up too. Also like the orange rocks that aren’t really orange, the purple fades and dulls away once from the sea.

The rest of the shells I look at and leave. The big white shards like shattered dinner plates. The oyster shells that glow pearly metallic. The clams and the mermaid bra tops.

It’s the rocks I really want. The rocks I bring home.

The other reason, of course, that this bringing of rocks is a habit I will not break is because I can’t.

I recognize in it a grabbing, a smallness, a futility. And framed like that, I’d of course prefer to stay away from it. I am not, will not be, the one who needs physical, tangible, in my palm proof that something is real. That something really happened the way it happened. That we went to the beach together, and the ocean got rough, and I drank three Narragansetts, and everyone got sunburnt, and you’re moving away now to a different beach on a different ocean. Or maybe the ocean is on the beach? No matter. I wish you wouldn’t do it. The going away from me.

I don’t need the rocks to make my feelings solid—or even for preservation’s sake. The memory, my memory is good. Good enough. I want them.

I want them in the antique Italian bowl that’s yellow like your aura, and has handles, and that I bought frankly for the sole purpose of housing them.

I want them so that I may never be unburdened. Let there always be rocks in my hands and pockets, bags, bowls and vases.

Let me forget where they come from—which day, which beach—let me mix them all together and say you’re form the bay and you’re from the sea and then loose track of which is which.

Let me let go in that way only. Is that enough surrender to even the scales. To make it okay for me to hold on to them. The now and one day unidentifiable rocks and pebbles are suffuse with a somethingness that I refuse to do without.

Don’t they look ordinary and dull away from the seashore? They might look it, but I know they aren’t.

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