re: calm.

letter. from x to x.
by kaila w montanna



I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing, but when I think back to those few short weeks on the coast, the smell of the ocean air rushes in towards me and when I close my eyes, I feel the shape of her face rise up into my mind… and I see. I can see the faint tan lines of her sunglasses on the sides of her face, the weathered straw hat she wore over her mess of wavy golden hair, and if I concentrate hard enough I can recall the patterns of freckles that sprinkled across her face, chest and arms like tiny golden sun spots, a luminous landscape of texture for the eyes. Details aside, it was her frame that caught me at first, her small petite frame, hardly taller then my thirteen-year-old cousin Alex but into the hostel lobby she walked, carrying on her back a pack twice her size, along with two pairs of running shoes tied at the laces and a worn out lime green yoga mat.

Our first encounter was simple and innocent—we met at the hostel bar her first day in. She was stopping off in V. for a week, and had traveled throughout South Asia and was moving her way across the West coast of the Americas. She had been gone for almost seven months and had another eight to go; as long as her bank account held out. That evening, the two of us made friends with a few others and spent the first sunset walking the coast, trading travel stories and skipping from rock to rock until it got too dark to see. The breeze that came in off the ocean was far cooler than any of us had expected and so the five of us settled onto a bench along the boardwalk and cuddled up against one another to keep warm. We were a bundled mass of bodies stemming from all over the world, sharing warmth, fish’n’chips and bits and pieces of each other we would never dare to share with anyone else, only strangers. Over the next few days, our group of five dwindled down to just the two of us. There was a connection that bonded our spirits, stretching from out of our past and into one another. Later that week, she prolonged her stay until my departure date. In our last few hours together, she spent a large part of it staring out at the ocean, caught up in a reverie, transfixed on something deep in the blue, as if she had spotted sunken treasure or some gem of immeasurable value. When I called out her name, she turned to me and smiled.

“The ocean. It calms me, when ever I get...lost.”

I smiled at her and told her that I felt the same way. I told her that being near it always gave me a sense of calm, made me feel like I always had a place to be. In the moments after when we were both silent, she looked at me with a solemn kind of peace, then proceeded to confide in me something that she has not told anyone; not her friends, family or any of the other traveling companions that she has met along the way. She told me the reason behind her fifteen-month excursion. And so on that night before the two of us would part forever, I sat out on the dock surrounded by a silence that filled the coast, haunted occasionally by the bellowing horn of some off-coast ship. She was positioned cross-legged beside me; her eyes pointed out into the black with her strands of her hair, glowing blue in the moon, trailing down her face. In the darkness, I took her hand, held it close to my heart and we let our silence speak for the rest of the night. I never saw her again, but wherever she is…