It had been years since Thalassa had sung, but the waves tugged the sound
free from her heart and up through unfamiliar vocal chords for the
wind to steal them away, carrying them out across the sea. Her voice
was different than she remembered it; lower, more mellow now, but not
sleepy or dull. It seemed that the vibration of it moved the world
around her in a way that she could not explain, but it excited her
aged heart.
She ended the last note with a soft laugh for the
thought. She was not old, but her heart had known so much so soon.
She had led a life concentrated; a life with all of the trials and
upheavals piled one atop the other without a break in the storm or a
lull in the troubled waters. She had often described it as a bad soap
opera whose writers would shy away from nothing to draw in, enthrall,
and shock their audience. Recently she noted that life had changed
dramatically, and it seemed, without her even noticing. The way she
lived her life was changing. She couldn’t remember the last
time she had had a nasty fight with her partner; jealousy and fear
didn’t seem to factor into her reactions and attitudes toward him
anymore, and when she did suspect that he wasn’t being entirely
honest it didn’t seem to matter at all. When she could drag him
away from his array of monitors in his home office she felt no
difficulty in holding his attention as she used to; he might look
away for a moment, but it was never more than a glance.
Another large change come recently was the absence of her children.
The youngest, Nimue, hadn’t quite moved out yet; but Thalassa had
converted part of the house into a suite of rooms for her with it’s
own exterior door, and Nimue had her own life now. No one felt left
out or disappointed when Thalassa went somewhere alone anymore. Doing
things for herself, by herself had felt awkward and wrong at first;
as if she should be ashamed of herself for not finding something to
do for others instead. But after 27 years begun with diapers and two
hour feeding cycles and fevers and hospital visits, followed by
getting only 4 hours of sleep every school night, bumbling through
all of the possible opportunities and their respective deadlines and
trying to ferret out the best pathway for them to take in order to
succeed in establishing a good life for themselves, all the while
trying to teach all of those things that schools can not, should not,
or will not, Thalassa knew she had earned this. She should have been
doing this all along. But they used to ask where she went, and Thalassa
could not lie to those sweet little faces; then there would be the
cloud of disappointment and guilt would gnaw at Thalassa’s insides
until she made amends that she often couldn’t really afford – and
it wasn’t always money that was over-spent. Thalassa had spent much of
her children’s lives up to this point ingesting a steady stream of
energy drinks and the like just to make it through the day without
falling asleep every time she sat down. But the frantic life of a
mother with children still dependent on her was quickly fading into a
lovely collage of singularities of memory.
Her life now was more
structured and predictable; even her spur of the moment dashes off to
the beach seemed as if they had been planned and set up for her. This
morning for example: She woke, hours before dawn and couldn’t get
back to sleep. Xander, her partner, had worked through the night as
was his custom and had recently crawled into bed and begun snoring;
he wouldn’t be awake again until afternoon. Thalassa crept out of bed
and showered and dressed in the guest suite (one of the older girls’
old bedrooms), and sat down to check the weather and her
email. She never got around to that email. The weather would be warm
and clear today. She knew she had nothing pressing on her schedule
and she realized suddenly that she had the opportunity to catch the
sunrise over the water and enjoy her morning coffee on the beach. She
made a quick change of clothes, grabbed a couple of water bottles,
shoved her laptop into her beach bag (which remained perpetually at
the ready), grabbed her camera and was out the door before that silly
little nagging voice in her head could wake up enough to stop her.
She barely met another vehicle on the interstate and could have sworn
she found her way through a wrinkle in space and time because it
seemed like she suddenly woke up and there she was on the main beach
road. Parking had been a trice, and there wasn’t another soul to be
seen near the water. She had forgotten the coffee entirely, but it
really didn’t matter. She was here for the blazing brilliance of
the sunrise before her and the sound of the ocean like song from a
dream.
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