Where My Life Begins and Ends

It was a Thursday morning when Ennio took us out on the boat. The soles of my feet were already scorched from standing too long on the ancient, splintered dock. I was tired and I couldn't wait to get in to the water.

The boat slithered out, and my lungs opened up. The smells of mussels invaded my air in gusts of wind which simultaneously soothed my burnt skin. My friend Giacomo inquired whether I thought the sea smelled like our lunch from yesterday. I told him it did.

Every man and woman on the boat with us spoke Italian. We were in Italy in fact, so this wasn't unusual. From the eloquent jungle of romantic dialogue, I picked out only a few words. 'Cena', which means dinner. 'Mare', the sea. And so often I'd hear 'Oggi', which means today.

Giacomo translated Ennio's speech as best he could for me. Something about Emperor Tiberius' villa, which was on our left. But I was more interested with the old man sitting across from me. He was looking right, to the sea. A sea he had most definitely seen thousands of times.

We came to the cave about thirty minutes after. The boat dropped us a couple hundred feet off, and we swam the remaining way to the mouth of it. It wasn't long before the cigarettes caught up with me. The old man went on strong, and I met him inside a few taxing minutes later.

We climbed over jagged rock to reach the inside of the cave. Beams of light glowed in through pre-historic crevices in the rock. The water inside, dramatically colder than the sea just outside, reinvigorated me with the connection to nature that my ancestors had felt long ago.

One wall of the cave extended just below the water. Beyond it, the backside of the cave faced the open ocean. I wished to swim underneath the rock to reach the solitude of outside, but fearing my breath would not hold, I stayed inside with the rest of the group.

Another smoker's lung swim ended triumphantly at the boat. The old man sat across from me. I looked at his legs. Gashed on the sharp rock. He looked at mine. The same. Not being able to speak, we looked to each other and lifted our hands with a mutual understanding.

The ride back to shore was far more melancholic. I watched the cave shrink out of sight. The old man shut his eyes and bathed in the serenity of the sun and of his modest and momentous life. Tomorrow he would be back in the cave, at the same time I would be on an airplane.

That night we ate spaghetti alle vongole with clams caught that very morning. They tasted like the cave. I was home the next day. From then on, I lived only in the past and the future. Forever thinking about when I would return to the cave once again, and face the open sea alone.