I knew she was trying to tell me something because I suddenly missed an ocean I had never seen. It came with the taste of salt and a particular weight of air against my skin. The water was a pale green, almost white where it folded over itself. I could hear it, although the room around us remained quiet. I was sitting on my bedroom floor. Sael stood beside the window. Neither of us had spoken.
Until that evening, I had imagined communication without words would be tidier than ordinary conversation. A thought would simply appear and I would understand it. Instead it was intimate, untidy, and difficult to separate from my own remembering. The ocean carried a feeling of waiting, but also relief. Somewhere within it was a question. I tried to answer aloud and felt immediately how small the sentence was compared with the thing she had offered me.
I asked whether it was her home. Her expression changed. There was affection in it, and something like amusement, but not the indulgent amusement people use with children. She brought her hands together and waited. The room returned completely: the little noise from the radiator, a car passing outside, the rough edge of the rug under my ankle. She had stopped sending whatever it was. I realized she was giving me room to decide whether to continue.
That mattered. I had spent years feeling that these experiences happened to me. There was little comfort in being told something was wonderful if I had no way to step away from it. I said I wanted to try again, more slowly. This time the image arrived at a distance. I could look at the ocean without becoming it. Along the far shore stood a row of narrow buildings with open interiors, their roofs turned upward like leaves.
A person appeared on the shore. I could not see a face. I felt Sael's recognition, then understood that I was standing inside a memory of someone she had lost. The question had not been about a location. It had been about whether I understood the ache of returning to a place after its meaning had changed. My eyes filled before I could make sense of why. She lowered her head. For the first time I thought of her as lonely.
I tried to offer her something in return. What came first was embarrassing: our kitchen, the old yellow bowl, my mother's hand pressing the lid onto a tin. Nothing majestic, nothing that could stand beside her impossible sea. I thought I had failed until Sael's face softened. I understood then that I had sent the feeling of being expected somewhere. The bowl was only how my mind had wrapped it. She had been able to unwrap it.
There were mistakes. When I remembered a summer storm, she responded to the fear beneath it, although I had meant the smell of the garden afterwards. When she showed me an illuminated chamber, I thought she wanted me to enter it. She meant that a question could remain open without being abandoned. We stopped often. Sometimes I laughed from the strain of trying. Sometimes I needed to look at the clock and remind myself of the plain furniture around us.
After a while she used a word. I heard it clearly, although her lips barely moved: enough. The sound startled me more than any of the images had. She touched the window frame with two fingers and I noticed a small crack in the paint beneath them. It was such a precise, ordinary detail that I wrote it down immediately afterwards. The crack is still there. I look at it when the rest begins to feel too large.
I spent the following morning drawing her eyes and getting them wrong. I made them too mysterious, then too gentle. Both choices were ways of making her easier to understand. In the end I kept the unfinished study. There is an uncertainty in the pencil that seems closer to what happened. I had not received a perfect message. I had sat with another person, struggled to understand her, and discovered that silence could contain misunderstandings of its own. Oddly, that made the encounter feel more believable to me.
Anna
