I like my new landlord. She is far kinder than the one who came before.
My last landlord was so cold. She would smother us, my siblings and I, in the darkness of her waves, and as we tossed and tumbled in the shallow water, she would take ourselves from us. Reducing us layer by imperceptible layer until we joined the grains of sand on which we slept. It was so loud, in my last home. We would be lifted with the waves and thrown against each other clicking and rattling as we went, and while it was never lonely, it exhausted us. Yes, I much prefer my new landlord. She asks so little of us, and for that we give her much.
My new landlord picked us from the water just the other day. She saw my gentle reds and pale bands of white and wished to take me home with her. She picked four of us, my siblings and I, and gathered us into the warmth of her pockets where the steady rumble of waves was for the first time in millennia a distant thing. It was warm in the pocket. It did not move us roughly as it swayed. It was soft in the way that waves are soft, and kind in a way they are not and never will be. She rolled us between her fingers all the while, humming a quiet song that rhymed with the buzzing sandflies and clicking legs of the crabs that live among our siblings even still.
She set us on a shelf in her home amidst rich green plants which rustle in the wind like crashing waves, painting my long memories with honey. We feel the mounting warmth of sunlight, my siblings and I, and we drink it in gratefully each morning. We cool again, when the sun sets, and bask in the steady circadian cycle with our plants. They are good companions, the plants, though the talk only slightly more than us. This we do not mind, for stones are quiet things; and when we are not made to talk and titter and sing with the forces which are sometimes bestowed upon us, we listen. She talks to us, my new landlord, and she talks to others while we are present, and it’s all the same to us because it is the natural order for all who speak to be heard. To be heard is a gift we stones, my siblings and I, give freely.
I do not know how long we will stay with our new landlord, my siblings and I, but we will love our time here all the same. When the walls do tumble and the world moves on, and we are once more released by greater forces into the embrace of new waves on new coasts or deep into our mother Earth’s arms, I will think back on my landlord, and I will be thankful. Although humans have such little lives and venture only so briefly into ours, we carry on their memory and the echoes of their words. Until such a time comes, we will listen and be comforted by the sound.