“You never really did like talking, did you?” she asks rhetorically.
As our fingers interdigitate and the sky dims deathly dark against the white waves of the Gulf of Mexico,
she accepts my silence as an answer while we walk westward into the ocean.

And what good would it have done for me to speak up?
The crashing waves on either side of us speak mountains more than my words ever could.

I speak mostly via my eyes.

My soul leaps and bounds out from my hazel shore and into her oceanic ports, her verdant eyes.
We walk toward the end of the pier, as the wind wailing against our ears drowns out the sound of our flip-flops flopping.
They’d go “flop… flop…” but neither of us can hear them.

The wind divides the water molecules from the salty ones, sending some up into the air and into our trajectory.
I can taste them on my skin and in my eyes.

As we pass the last obstruction and the air that aspires to be a hurricane intrudes our lungs, a mantra plays in my head, words she once said:

A healthy relationship is one in which you’re comfortable with the noise and the silence.

And here we are with both the opaque sound and the deafening quiet, each paradoxically cancelling out the other.
If the flop of our shoes is masked by the sound of the waves, perhaps the distress on my face might never meet her eyes.

But it does.

And as we return eastward from our finger-locked, tongue-tied stroll down the Naples Pier, she takes the south exit while I take the north.