Our love, deep and brooding and turbulent and unpredictable as the so-called pacific, withdrew curiously out to the horizon, almost out of sight. And it stayed there for a while. Questioning this new state of affairs, we wandered the beach, looking at the recently revealed seafloor, with all the stones and old tires and flopping fish and garbage that had always been down there, as eerie sirens wailed. It stayed out for a year in fact, and when it came back, the wave was with godsized severity and old testatement inevitablitily, at first astonishing, then amazing, then awesome, and finally terrific, in the oldest senses of the words.
It came back with great speed, and smashed into the beach, towering like a building over the unfortunates who had not fled. To be swept away is as to be taken by a river; which, mighty and terrifying in flood stage, is still orders of magnitude less potent than the ocean. A man, aware of the futulity of fleeing, stood arms at his sides and watched fate as it rushed up to meet him. Others tried to flee, but they were far too late in this decision.
The wave blasted in like a bomb, turning black as it roared across the land; crushing, obliterating, eating, devouring, destroying every thing, living or inanimate. It came with an unstoppable power that only a moving thing the size of an ocean can contain within itself, when it decides to go somewhere. It rushed in, higher and deeper, changing to a murky brown then inky black, full of flotsam and toiling with roaring splashing that drowned the cries of the miserable. It ripped further and further inland, until it met the base of the mountains where it scarcely paused and went up.
We, it, us, commingled and inseperable as gangrenous flesh from different limbs oozes together, were born along with it, and were smashed into hard realness of Taiwan.
up it roared with a bass fury as though intelligently determined to destroy as much as possible, to wipe the slate clean, to remove all trace of what had been built by the hands of men.
up, up the mountains came the ocean, in a great wave that for a moment appeared as though it would swallow Taiwan itself, even the mighty mountains, and continue on across the world.
But it didn't. Our life together stopped, black as night, full of trash and laden with human suffering of all kinds, and it lapped gently against the base of an ancient stone pillar, formerly squared at the corners but now rounded with age, bearing a carved warning, "Build nothing you love below this point, for it will inevitably be swept away." And there we were, too late to react, doomed from the start, destined for our wave to turn foul; and, after pausing at that stone marker, slowly turn and start to rush back to sea, faster and faster, back towards the west, taking with it an equal and oppositely destructive force, until cars and people and rocks and ropes and boats and buildings were piled high in the foul muck, abandoned by the foulness than ablated their meaning from the land, leaving only the hideous miasma and its own, finally revealed, black truth, that coated and blanketed everything it had uprooted, tortured, killed, and finally buried.
Of course, there were survivors, but nothing was ever the same again, at least not within our lifetimes.
I went to the old three stair tonight, in front of the old house. Unskated for a year, most of the marks have left the stone curbs, so I rewaxed them. A few tricks in, the tail snapped. The tail stayed on though, open wide across the middle like the mouth of a huge stupid newt. Oh well. It guess it's a metaphor for something. I fucking hate pretentious metaphors. Time for a new skateboard.
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