I stared at the object in my hand. The envelope had been lying in wait in the mailbox on a bruised March morning, a day after Ray’s death. There was no return address. Not until I had removed the layers of tissue from around the unexpected content did I realize it was from him.

    “Find out what it says” he had scrawled on an accompanying note. Nothing more.

    Ray, my soul mate, my fragile, elusive friend!  His laughter and his curiosity about every thought, possibility and dream had stirred my life for the past twenty years. I sailed on our easy understanding gaily in every wind that blew, while he shared his bottomless and sparkling knowledge and so left me an indestructible treasure. His enthusiasm for life lent clouds a taste and trees a song. Yet, strange as it seems, he was never at home in this world. Now he was lost to it, his voice already a memory but for the message in my palm.

    It was a shell, flat and of a reddish color, perfect in its fanlike shape. Its surface was covered with delicate tubes made of lime, once home to the worms who built them. I held the shell at arm’s length. Seen like that, the loopy shapes appeared to be lines inscribed by a characteristic hand.

    Ray had smiled at my lingering childhood fancy that water possessed a language of its own. I claimed it wrote messages on the sand, and in the foam crowning the waves I saw lines I was always at the verge of deciphering. Now he was challenging me to succeed.

    And every attempt would be accompanied by the pain of doing it without him.

    I never could resist a challenge from Ray, and would not fail him by shying away from the last. On haphazard travels I searched frozen banks of creeks where icicle-rimmed rocks threw jagged shadows, inscribing the snow with more messages. They spoke to me, but mostly of the holes Ray’s absence ate into my days. I was amazed at how much emptiness weighs when you carry it with you.  We had always been aware how weak his heart had become. It was the reason he wanted no love, only friendship. But had he known his last day had overtaken him when he posted the shell to me? Had he meant it as his farewell? Had he sensed that his body would be found just hours later in a frosty mound of last year’s leaves, near the ferry he loved to ride?

    Spring wiped streaks of blue over the ground when a diminutive wildflower known to me only by the name of “Ray’s Flower” rose from the wakening earth. I had named it that on one of our rare rambles together when we saw it for the first time and neither of us knew what it was. They grew thickly by the valley lake, underscoring its dark mirror that threw my questions back at me.

    The mountain lakes were still wearing thin ice and I studied the cracks in it, the play of dark lines on translucent white. I would have loved to write on paper like that, but Ray had taken my words with him. Silence revolved in my mind, spinning into a void.

    At other times I felt here were words, suspended over cold depths, ready for me to use if I only understood them.

    Early summer found me struggling to read the beaches of first the Baltic, then the North Sea. It had always been the cold waters that spoke the most clearly to me. As a child I had insisted the seagulls were translating the language of the waves. Later I wrote a poem I announced to have transcribed from the surface of a petrified sea urchin.  Now, decades and desperations later, I walked along the shore staring at lines of washed up seaweed tangles. Words, every one of them – almost, almost legible, while the waves whooshed and whispered in my ears, insisting they had things to tell me. At low tide, the wavy traces the currents left in the sand were another manifestation of writing, clearer, simpler, yet as tantalizingly elusive. A steady wind soon dried the lines, lifted and shattered them.

    Even the grass growing on the dunes in patches and patterns struck me like writing from afar. I sat among it and waited and watched, then slept and dreamed of Ray until a questioning rabbit woke me. The lime loops the worms had left on the shell I carried in my pocket remained as silent as before. Yet something had shifted, somewhen, somewhere on my quest along the waters. They now comforted me by being there rather than emphasizing my loneliness, though I would never know what they said.

    I went swimming. The stunning cold of the water pierced my pain and made me feel devastatingly alive. Below me, a row of sea stars, a few of them missing arms, resembled capital letters moving into a future on myriads of tiny feet.

    It was at the northern end of Denmark, where the Baltic Sea and the North Sea meet, that a realization swept my mind, carried towards me on a strong current and blown in my face by a salty, generous wind. Here the waves of both seas crashed into each other and in doing so wrote a grand, three-dimensional dancing line from my feet straight towards the horizon.  Silver drops played into the sky above it like the dots on i’s that spoke of a light, joyous note in what the line was telling me. For a precious moment I could read it, hear the words it spelled out.

    For an intake of breath, it was Ray writing on the oceans, writing across Earth to tell me what he had wanted me to discover: that I need not decipher the water’s writing, not the letters the sea stars copied, the seaweed left lying on the sand or worms inscribed on a shell.

    The words were there all along for me to take, even before I knew Ray. Words I myself could pull from earth, sea and sky and give them heart and melody. I needed no seagulls to translate, no waves to write them. The whispering and the traces of the water on sand were the gift and mine was the joy to wrap it in words. Knowing Ray had been part of the gift. He had made me listen and look for them, had turned my life into a page and a promise.

    So, like a seagull, I am free at times to fly on a sentence that rings true, a phrase that satisfies, a chapter that catches a golden glimpse of what I feel is written below what the surface shows in glorious shades of shifting grey, swirling blue and foaming green.

    Yet sometimes, when I swim, a sudden warmer current touches me from beneath like a friend, and in dusk and dawn when I stand at a shore or lake and listen, Ray’s voice drifts tonelessly over the water, just out of reach. A silhouette reflected for a moment recalls his, or a branch is moved by the breeze in a way that makes his familiar gestures come alive.

    And where the water touches the bank, a snail slowly inscribes the sand with a message I can almost, almost read.