The Jar

When I was 14, I thought I held the whole ocean in a bottle, a big old mason jar with a twistable top.

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I thought I could just take a part of something, just a bottle’s worth of sand and seawater, and make it worth the whole, make it more of a something than it actually was.

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I felt a little like David, holding the ocean in my palms, running the cold glass over my bandaged fingers, feeling like I had, for a moment, captured something greater than myself, contained something uncontainable, vanquished a Goliath, no, a Leviathan, and I was holding her maw in my hands.

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But as I looked up and my eyes met the booming, white-crested waves, I began to feel a little too much like Jonah for my liking. I broke the jar on the sand and let the ocean take back what was hers.