10 MInute Prompt: Start with a word you love....

I know there's a word I love, but I can't think of it just now. Nothing much comes to mind, mostly fog and wind. I can hear the dull boom of a fog horn, the seeking cry of a seagull, asking for scraps, asking for a friend, asking the way home. I can hear a distant highway shushing in the still light evening, white lights on the left, red lights on the right. A wise ship travels the middle channel. I hear a barking dog in the distance, everything is in the distance. The dog doesn't know why he's barking. I hear my breath running the gauntlet into my head before settling into my lungs, and leaving by a quieter rout.

I'm still trying to think of my favorite word. I think of things I like to look at. But rainbow is not among my favorite words. And bird doesn't sound particularly nice. For a while black-tailed gull was my favorite word. Crashing is a good one too, like the waves on the beach, pushing the tiny pebbles to rub and grind against each other so that they sound like that distant highway.

Ocean could be my favorite word, with its intimation of unexplored depths and deceptive surface where whitecaps can look like a table top before they bowl themselves over into whitecaps again. Ocean is the vastness, with an assumption of boundaries, in the center of which we are completely vulnerable, completely dependent, completely at the whim of the thing itself which feels like infinity. Ocean bears us up, buoys us. Ocean feels like the home we knew before we were borne into the arms of the world. Ocean is my favorite word today.