when i am fifty years old, i will live in an elegant but simple oceanside home. it will be a modest home, but with large rooms and high ceilings and a spaceous balcony over the ocean. and every night i will pace that balcony, dark eyes still sharp and hair streaked with grey as if wind-painted. i will be like a ninteenth-century captain's wife on a widow's walk in intensity, but on a different search.

i will watch the ocean not because it may bring me news of one i love, but because the steady coming and going of the tides, the rhythmic, beating waves challenges me in some way. the endless water is great. no matter what i may have accomplished by that time, i will stand by the sea, and know that i am nothing.