the beekeeper.

tidal wave.

I never liked beaches.
The air was always stuffy and smelt like decaying seaweed and wet sand
And I hated how the air tasted.
There was no shade to hide from the sun,
And I always left feeling scorched and looking nothing short of a lobster.

But you...
You came along and the beach became home.
Suddenly the salt in the air became the ocean's tears and we wept for her together.
The sunshine still burnt but
You taught me to forgive her by saying,
"She's all alone up in the sky, wouldn't you be bitter, too?"
And that helped me understand and gain some empathy.

You left handprints along the shoreline of my skin,
And you buried yourself neck deep into the sand of my brain,
And when you did, all of the grains scattered,
And since then, everything's looked so blurry.

I met you on that beach.
Do you remember that?
Do you remember how I was trapped in polluted water and you were starving,
Disintegrating,
But you cut me loose anyway?
Together we were a pair of seagulls that were too sick to fly,
Just trying,
Crying for someone to feed our emptiness
And they all turned their backs on us, but God,
Look at how we made it.
Do you remember that?

Do you remember when I plucked hermit crabs off of the beach,
Set them in my pail,
And took them home to live with us?
I told you, "They look so helpless and alone."
And after that, you brought back buckets of sand from
Our beach
To make them feel at home.

You know, this may sound silly to say,
But in a sense, you and I were a hermit crab duo.
That beach was my House,
You were the shell I hid behind,
And I was the hermit that clung to you.
But the difference between our love and hermit crabs
Is that shells don't outgrow hermit crabs,
Hermit crabs are supposed to outgrow shells,
But somehow, somewhere, you fell off of my back
And I know,
I know it's because I shrunk down into nothing
That not even you could cling to my back anymore
And Our beach couldn't bring me down to earth.

And it's because of that, we didn't fit anymore.

But dammit, when was it that I lost you?

Was it when the sun seemed unforgivable,
Or when our tank fell off of the desk and shattered into pieces?
Was it when the hermit crabs' shells broke in the downfall
And the dog ate every
Single
One?

Without you clinging to my heart,
The world seemed so hot, so painful,
And I was so damn Vulnerable.
How could I have lost you when you were the only part of me worth keeping?

I finally found you at the edge of the tide on our beach.
When I saw you, you were a Shell of the man I used to know,
And when I approached you and began to apologize for letting you slip away,
That's when you told me that you unlatched yourself from my body,
And ran away to the sea,
How you just wanted me for the ride and how the
Sun wasn't lonely, she was just cruel and hated me
And how she never burnt you.
Your words were like sea urchins stabbing to my ears
And they just kept coming,
And coming,
Like how you told me how you took a baseball bat and smashed my terrarium,
And how our home was nothing more than a beach,
But what you didn't understand is that the beach was just a house,
A structure,
Something to surround myself in and pour memories into,
But you,
You were my home.

That's when the ocean didn't weep for the Sun anymore.
She wept for me,
And the tears that dropped from my eyes melted into her water.
All you did was stare at the edge of the tide,
That's all you ever did,
And I just wept, oh God how I wept,
So much, in fact, that the tide began to come in all too soon and
Before I knew it,
Before I could stop myself,
Before anyone could calm me down,
You were swallowed whole by the ocean.
And after that...
After you were gone...
I just couldn't stop.

The waves kept coming in and flooding our house and
All the remnants of your handprints began washing away,
And even though I screamed and screamed for you to dig yourself out,
In my brain,
You drowned in the sand you buried yourself in.

I find it painfully ironic how I flooded our house but you,
You were the tidal wave that tied my feet to an anchor
And threw it in a trench,
And now matter how hard I pulled and tried to bring it back up,
I was stuck.

Years after that tidal wave,
I know you're somewhere warm, cozy, happy
Riding on some other hermit crab's back in the bottom of the sea.
While I ride along these waves
Just trying to keep my head above the water.