laughing and hovering

The world looked cold today. A monochrome sketch of a pale, glowering sky met by a slate, ravaged sea. All things de-saturated, the frigid air and bitter wind sucked the colour out of everything. The gulls gave smug looks as they hovered on and with the wind, floating without effort and laughing. Gulls seem to feel no cold. They fly and hover because they can. They spread their wings and the air takes them. They mock the people beneath as they huddle, scrunched against the gale, unable and unwilling to let it carry them.

To add insult to injury, sometimes they shit upon those huddled masses.

I'm surprised it doesn't freeze on the way down. Imagine that: death by frozen seagull shit. You don't get much more ignominious than that.

I write about the weather while I think about all manner of other things. It's always convenient when the elements match the tumult in my head. It gives the illusion of sympathy in nature. If it had been sunny and harmonious today, I may have been grumpier and certainly more resentful. As it was, I found a certain amount of solace in seeing the maelstrom of my thoughts and feelings mirrored by the climatic antics outside.

I could utter all manner of platitudes and metaphors about what ails my head and heart at the moment. It would do me little good. They are not problems unique to me, nor have they been inflicted on me by some nefarious malefactor. For the most part, they're the realities of life, in many cases self-inflicted. Love, loss, passion, purpose and that desperate longing for a pause button.

I looked and I watched the breakers crash, trying to see some manner of symmetry in the waves. It was clear, vivid; I found clarity, if not symmetry.

What I didn't find was answers. More and more I find answers a pointless pursuit, so in that sense it was a bit of a relief. People looking for answers frequently forget the questions. I'll take clarity and good questions over answers any day, even a cold one with a bitter wind-chill, raging seas and gloating gulls.