i'll try not to make a hobbit of it

this really spoke to me, as a trans hippie shut-in.

I never really understood what it meant to be young and not be able to walk to the water. To not witness dragonfly feeding frenzies in the summer. To not have herons nest in your yard. To not see blocks of ice grind against the shoreline in February.

When I moved out of my parents' house, I was no longer next to a river. I wasn't next to any water.

But after that, I lived three blocks from the bay. I'd walk down to the pier for lunch, weather permitting, and get a sandwich, glass-bottled cane-sugar Orange Crush, and just sit and eat with the cormorants.

I'd sit on my balcony and watch thunderheads crawl up the coastline, a solid line of slate gray that devoured more space than I could contain in my field of vision. They'd shower the sky with lightning, brilliant against the unobstructed dark.

No matter what else happened, the wind and the waves were there, constant, uninterested in the machinations of the city. They stood separate, part of something too old to care about my one little life.