The Returning by Rob O’Keefe

The wind off Nauset Bay is strong and insistent, demanding my presence. It draws me from the long comfort of my home, and yet, it does not have to pull too hard. This is the debtor’s wind and I know why it is here.

Should I resist, the wind would howl its urgency until there was nothing left in its path. This way, at least, I will leave a marker, some sign of a life lived.

I pause before I begin my walk to the end of the island’s lone pier. I take in the familiar shoreline, stretching wide north to south, teeming with the activities of the tempered souls who are tethered here, much like I was, and whisper my goodbyes. I will not return.

I reach the end of the pier and the wind wraps itself around me, lifting me into the grey. I fall away from the world, and commence my travels along the New England coast, passing high over the rocky palisades of Maine as the wind begins to extract my debt.

I am here because of a promise made during the surety of youth, absent consideration and consequence. I did not understand then that some oaths carry a heaviness, a burden never to be lifted.

There are, of course, five eternal oaths: one to love, one to hate, one to protect, one to forgive, and the last one – the one I made – the promise to return. This one is the province of the wind in all its forms: zephyrs, mistrals, gales, and squalls. And the wind has a lasting memory.

The returning wind, and I in its unrelenting grasp, now race above the shoals of Canada, witnessing the clash between Nova Scotia’s ragged edges and the cold, heartless Atlantic. If the Pacific is the ocean of the possible, the Atlantic is the sea of the doomed.

I become aware of others caught in the wind, their promises swept up and remembered. They travel elsewhere to their fates. My journey continues north and east.

The dull tumult of the ocean is replaced by the stolid brilliance of ancient ice. The glaciers of Greenland claw back, relentless, leaving only an expanse of hollows and bones. Like the land below, I too am stripped of all that I was. Still, I have further to go.

Ahead lie the shores of Connemara, wild and low. I see where past wraiths have gathered, their hauntings complete. The living wander among the curraghs – the old, wicker boats – in hope of avowed reunion.

The ones I promised are not here, neither wraiths nor seekers, so perhaps those lives remained whole, unaffected. Our years, it seems, were not poetic after all: a promise to return in time, a promise to wait forever, two stanzas of uneven magnitude, separated by the capricious breeze that so easily swayed me from these shores. But still, my debt is not diminished, my account remains, even if I am no longer who or what I was.

Now, I am the wind, come to collect.

Rob O’Keefe

Image by Jennifer Crowder from Pixabay – Sandy beach with ocean waves at Nauset bay Cape Cod

Cover art by the author. – A misty image of the end of a small wooden pier is shades of sand and brown.