Without Emotion

       The beach is empty in a way that makes me feel like just another piece of sand lying among a billion others, carelessly blown by an easterly trade wind up and down the beachfront in a halting and tentative way; moving, stopping, and starting again, changing locations and meditating briefly in every new place, leaving behind a trail of footprint shaped miniature craters in the malleable piles of dry sand that are soon blown over and made flat again by more bits of sand; sand that is ever ready to be, at a moment’s notice, taken up by the breeze and dropped in some new spot like an eminent domain-backed mandatory government relocation program without all the picketing and letter writing and litigation and ‘you can’t do this’s and tears and long goodbyes.  The cratered crescent of a five day old moon hangs roughly thirty degrees above the horizon, motionless and smiling down upon me like a not quite fully invisible Cheshire cat with its head cocked, its reflected radiance veiled by a slow-moving and taciturn cumulonimbus who’s thoughts are centered not on the giant, pock-marked satellite of ancient awe or the mirrored brightness thereof, but rather on its own weight and density, calculating sans émotion the various factors at play which will, later that evening, all coalesce into a single outcome; namely, the collapse of the towering, rain-heavy giant and the following downpour that will ensue over a small section of the Moroccan north-Atlantic coast, the effects of which will be felt only locally as the Sebou and Bou Regreg rivers swell past customary early-Springtime levels, flooding the drying hectares of the surrounding farmland and stoking the long untended fire of optimism in the remaining farmers; farmers who are cautious but will allow themselves a secret smile and the expectation of possible reversed fortunes but who will ultimately be disappointed when the rains stop again before morning and the water recedes and floods back out into the Atlantic, finding itself once again trapped in the cycle of oceanic convection, dragged thousands of leagues under the sea where the darkness is as suffocating as the pressure until finally breaking free and escaping up to the surface, hoisted up out of the vast blue by the Sun in little pockets of warm air, rising steadily until the cozy, thermal pouches lose their initial warmth and the water vapor dilutes and mixes with the surrounding air, condensing and immediately freezing in the midst of an icy cirrostratus floating lazily above the breeze, alone and aloof but secretly glad for the new company; a cloud that at this very moment is just beginning to take shape six kilometers above and one kilometer off the coast of Mauritania but will cause little in the way of rainfall upon which the aforementioned farmers desperately depend.  The greenish gray underbelly of the growing giant is centered almost directly above me and extends out hundreds of meters in every direction on the x-axis, its overcast hue gradually transforming from the wrenching black-green of an eye which had been caught the day before by an impressive right hook to a weak graphite to a sea-sick yellow to a sort of muted golden-pink brought on by the various reflections and refractions of imperceptibly-tiny rays of light extending from a sinking March sun off of a well balanced mixture of decades-old pollution from a coal powered and industry heavy phosphorous mining town twenty kilometers upwind and the densely clustered water-vapor-just-recently-turned-precipitation of a thunderstorm waiting to break.  The semi-bright, quickly-fading-into-deep-purple-and-blue-but-as-of-yet-still-pale-orange-and-pink layers of sky hovering just over the freshly set sun make the contrasting murky green core all the more ominous looking.  Gazing down at the swelling cloud with the semi-interested attention of a gallery of would-be cultural aficionados at a tolerably well done rendition of some mildly popular, seven month old off-Broadway musical, pixel-like pricks of light from the brightest stars of faraway galaxies, the transmissions of which had been interrupted on numerous occasions by giant clouds of interstellar dust and gas during the multi-light-year travel that had had to ensue before arriving at Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, such that the tiny, shiny dots in the sky had an on-again, off-again flicker to them - the effects of which had played a prominent role in the whilom tradition of amateur, terran, stereographic projection folksong - had just recently become visible against the backdrop of multicolored strata of sky - the section not covered by the pregnant cumulonimbus – a section of sky that one very experienced but tragically mono-syllabic sunset connoisseur would describe later to her friends as, “like, so, so great!”, and gave the whole scene a sort of sports stadium feel during an especially impressive performance when the audience is compelled to retrieve from their purses and fanny-packs which have been strewn unceremoniously along the cement ground under their spring-loaded, plastic seats among the peanut shells and plastic cups containing a last few warm ounces of lite beer their overpriced cameras and click away with thousands of tiny flashes at a distance too great to achieve satisfactory results.  The majority of these stars, like the orbiting moon, are hidden, partially or completely, by the far reaching cloud but are there none-the-less and would appreciate mention of their presence considering the facts that they were there long before and would remain long after the brief and violent life of this particular collection of floating water droplets thank-you-very-much.  Spread out below the reticent thinking of the cumulous giant and the thousand year-old flashing of the faraway, globular nuclear reactors, the Atlantic Ocean, its boundless expanse restricted only by limited eyesight and imagination, tumbles placidly over itself, gently rising and falling and crashing and shushing, its distant horizon a mere black line separating the pale pink-turning-purple-not-sure-exactly-what-that-color-is-called of an evening sky still alive with the light of an already set sun and the deep blue of an ocean ready for the coming nightfall.  A crew of twenty some-odd men, most of whom are migrant workers from the nation’s south and have come north in search of work, who haven’t seen their families in years but remit more than three-quarters of their paychecks every month without fail in hopes of eventually returning home to the places of their families, friends, and birth to start life anew, pass the evening curled up in their bunks staring at old pictures of faraway people, remembering how life was outside of the metallic underbelly of a hulking 20th century fishing ship; a ship currently sitting idle under the moon and clouds and stars, as lonesome as the workers, imperceptibly bobbing, rising and falling with the rolling waves like a black shadow silhouetted against the tired backdrop of an increasingly darkening evening sky.  The light whistle of soft wind steadily blown through empty seashells and the just-poured-soda fizzle of gently crashing foamy, white waters still high from the gravitationally powerful coincidental occurrence of a week-old perigean spring tide and the culmination of a moon just beginning the principal lunar semidiurnal do not go unnoticed.  I am alone with the sand and the moon and the cloud and the stars and the boat and the noise.