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I write about boundaries. They mark edges, limits, endings, beginnings. Behaviors. Barriers. Something personal, or physical, or solid or liquid, something you can observe, stay within, cross. We follow measured, known landscapes to their edges, and sometimes we hunger to see what’s over that horizon. Other times we quake in fear.

I write about the sea. It has no obvious markers, no posted speeds, no welcome signs, and no written warnings, unless you learn to read the clouds, the wind, the sky color, the birds, the smells, and maybe even the thickness of the universe.

And I write about the sea inside us.

On a boat at sea my shoes are as useless as anvils to astronomy, but they’re not needed when your mind goes bump, bump, bump from cloud to cloud as if empty of everything, a person erased but an erasure still a person. Everywhere I look I’m confronted by time’s passage. Even the stars remind me with their fossil light, the waves with their unique patterns never to be repeated in precisely the same way. Perhaps the ocean’s grand nonchalance is a mystery too deep, too proud, not meant to be solved in the rational way we know the speed of the earth’s spin at each line of latitude.

On watch at sea, I scan the horizon for ships. I look down at the darkened cabin at Jim, inert in his bunk, and feel a surge that can only be captured by the thought: he’s sleeping. Two words, mundane, physically accurate, but also carrying the full range of love that is possible to hold in a beating heart inside a body on a boat sailing across the heart of the ocean.

Karen

P.S. I dabble in comedy writing, too.