My Vision.

The waves are small, but relentless.

Warden is off his leash, but he is not interested in anything but watching the water with me. He is exhausted. It is late. Or it is early. I haven't checked the time in a while, but we have been sitting here for a long time. I'm not interested in the time, I tell myself. I am watching the water, and my whole life rolling by in it. I haven't slept in 36 hours. I haven't eaten over the same span.

Warden can sleep with his eyes open. He rests half his brain at a time. He is afraid that he will miss something if he gives in totally to sleep. I stopped worrying a long time ago that I might be missing something. That's a lie. I obsess over whether I'm missing something. Somewhere, right now, something is going on and I am missing it. My whole life, I have been somewhere doing nothing, while somewhere else something is happening. Something great. Something important.

I think about my situation. About my crisis. About my crises. My whole life, a series of crises. Catastrophes supplanted by catastrophes. It's not so bad, I whisper to myself. I know this is true. I know this is a lie. If I have twenty years left, am I blessed or cursed? That is the question, I suppose.

Warden is snoring now, the sound barely audible over the quiet crashing of the pedestrian Lake Erie waves, and I think about love. About those I've loved and lost. About those I can't love as much as I wish I could.

His eyelids flutter. Sand has embedded itself deep into his fur. For a split second, I worry about it flaking off into my car's upholstery. Than I embrace my elementary understanding of Buddhism and shake off the idea. My car doesn't exist, I think to myself emphatically.

I don't exist. Or I do exist. I am pure existence. I am everything. I stare, and stare until the waves become wings and I am floating over the lake, watching Curt Jimenez and his dog Warden sitting quietly and contentedly in the middle of the night, just watching water. I think, that is something what they are doing. They think they are missing something, but everything that is happening is right in front of them.

I soar higher. I can see that it is cold, but I am no longer something which is bothered by such things. The wind is not a nuisance, but a friend, an ally. A peer. It is a force, like me. In a trance, I slowly and deliberately take off my shoes, my socks. My pants, my underwear, my windbreaker. My sweatshirt and my t-shirt. I am naked. I am pure Curt Jimenez, unencumbered, unobstructed. I am back at the beginning, or I am a millisecond before the end. I am outside of time. Warden snorts and gets up, and expresses disapproval as I begin to run. And run. I run out into the water, until the waves roll over my head. I shout at the top of my lungs. I emerge from the water and roll in the sand, laughing and crying. Warden licks my face, and I hug him with everything I have.

Now I am really crying. Not with sadness, though.

I have had my vision.