'Sometimes Dark, Sometimes Grand'

The further we went, the smoother the sand was. Only in the act of sifting the grains through my hands did I realize how long I've not been out, in the open, at night. I let it fall from one hand to the other; scooped up some more and repeated it all over. I had made myself a makeshift hourglass.

I've always felt strange standing at the beach, staring out into the open sea, with its beating waves and breezes. Strange because there is no wonderment in me; no sense of revisitation. That it's as if I had never left. Maybe it's just indifference. Or cul-de-sacs making their way into my mind that at times I seem to be heading nowhere; that every place that I'm going to seems (or feels) the same--jadedness.

The same cannot be said for this town though. I come back every weekend, but somehow there's always something foreign in the air that greets me. Invades me, perhaps. Forming in my synapses and nerves transmissions--perceptions of newness--something alien for me each week; experiences which I take in like a sponge: rising and crumbling architecture; great trees uprooted by storms; a Japanese house guest; a tiffin carrier which stubbornly refuses to open.

That in a reaction similar to osmosis, my environment is constantly seeking to achieve equilibrium with my self; as even unintentionally erected walls of aloofness can be made semipermeable. So that even I--I, who was at one time even more concentrated than the sea, can be diffused by a simple thing, like water.

And be new again.

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