Sea of Cortez

We walk down off the rocks, on to the sand, then into the sea.

It is astonishingly warm, the air drenched in a moist heat unlike anything one like myself, born and bred in northern climes, has ever felt before. The one with me is the love of my life, the woman who will one day become my wife, and later the mother of my children, the one I love, the only one, the one, the only one.

We are here, swimming in the Sea of Cortez, together, in the sun, our skin bronzed and salty, our spirits contented.

Together, we frolic, we lounge about, we love, we are alive as two who have found an end to the separation and aloneness of being and who will not ever go back to walking in solitude until one or the other is torn from this world by death. We eat ceviche with shrimp and drink cold beer, and we are drunk with the happiness just to have arrived in this place, here, now.

Yesterday, we ran into the sea, finding the beach empty, thinking we had it all to ourselves. But as we entered the water, something unexpected happened.

We looked at one another. What is that? Do you feel it?

We both thought, for an instant, that something had gone drastically wrong, that our brains had failed, each of them as one, at the same time, and that some illusion had overcome us both. Odd sensations, unrecognizable as anything but alien at first, then translated eventually into signals of pain by the confused nerve cells in our bodies.

I looked at her, and she at me. As one, we two ran, silent, from the water, and then we exploded in laughter. Only then did we look at the sign on the beach, which alerts swimmers of the dangers of jellyfish infestations of these waters during certain times of the day.

The stings only heightened our sense that we inhabited a world of rare perfection and intensity. That we were chosen and privileged and should not for a moment forget to feel gratitude for such undeserved grace.

Today, we are warier and check the water gingerly before entering, but we giggle at yesterday’s misadventure, bonded still more closely together by it. Today, the jellyfish stay in the depths, and they leave the delicious part of the sea along the shoreline all to us.

We swim out a few meters and we float, suspended in the pristine salt water, fearless, immortal, protected by a love without bound or limit.