Gabrielle’s Magical Notebook

It’s easy to be lonely at the lake. Your eye wanders over all that space just aching for something to catch it, to hold it. At night it’s so easy for your gaze to trip lightly over the horizon and before you know it you’re searching the sky for comfort. But the waves just move in their dance and the stars just twinkle in their cold sockets.

I’ve taken my loneliness to the lake many times. I let it roll off of me like heat, let it roll out on the water. I pray the tide will take it away and bring me back something to quiet the echoes in me. Sometimes the moon shines down on me and we stare at each other looking for something we will never find. So many stories say the moon is lonely. She lost her lover, her friend and she can only stare down at our Earth and search for a glimpse of his face. No story says she ever found him again. Her search has never been rewarded, her vigil never broken. I guess the stories all think she shouldn’t have lost him in the first place.

The moonlight will sometimes play tricks on the eyes when you’re sitting by shore. All the color is bleached away and everything is blue, black and silver. My hands finally turn white under the moonlight and all my clothes turn black, the proper color of loneliness. Everything goes with black, but nothing ever changes it, lightens it. The water is black and dark blue by night. The only light shines from the tips of the waves as they rise and fall on the shore.

There is something lonely about the sound of waves. Especially at night when they hit an empty shore. It is endless, unbroken like a long night, rhythmic and regular like a heartbeat, constant like a hurt no one else can see. I sway in time with the waves. The undertow pulls me out forward and then the muted crash pushes me back. Forward and back, forward and back like a dance by myself in an empty room.

The waves are the fingers of the lake reaching to the shore for some understanding, seeking a remedy for this ache. The waves reach for me like I reach for them. But our hands have missed each other and our fingers close on empty air.

It is cold here where I sit. The moonlight has bleached all the colors away and my world has turned dark with only the sound of water to orient myself. We sit alone together the moon, the waves and I.