A Walk On the Beach
I went again today ... to that place, the allurement overwhelming ... the one
we called "ours" so tritely, "mine" before you, "mine" again now, (tho' others
have doubtless staked claimed - ages before and since). I went there to
"forget" you ... to put life in perspective again - to feel the awe of all creation
and my insignificance amidst it ... yours ... ours. Just one of the endless
ways I forget you each day.
My essence is there ... an open-air cathedral for the melancholy, (and I one of
its honored caretakers and most stolid gargoyles, cold as granite). The
redolent brine ... laughing gulls ... clang of a buoy ... hypnotic wave wash, like
it's lulling the day to slumber, or heartening me to listen ... listen to the
rhythmic music of nature's capricious breath.
I walked to the end, where the ledges meet the sand, (the way we always
did), a bit of a hike, more than three miles down and back, I think, but it
seems as near as ever when I'm so enthralled with what my senses drown me
in. It's always there, (waiting for me, I like to think) ... "Our" rock ... hours
spent there ... talking deep, talking nothing ... kissing, arguing, ruminating,
dreaming, being silent, being loud ... (minds at one moment as if one, the
next, eons apart ... our own worlds).
That rock, though molded and shaped by centuries of water and wind, fit us
perfectly ... as if all those years of endless pounding of surf and gale, were a
premonition for our special moments ... was a monotonous preparation, for
romantic fools like me who find fate inescapable ... who find happenstance
hard to accept, and who believe that this rock was placed here for our
purposes alone ... (foolish).
Imagine the stories that rock has absorbed ... not just mine, but endless
others, who have found that place as special and receptive for love and
melancholy as we. I wonder, when others are there alone, if they do as I do -
I talk out loud to no one - out into the ether - sometimes from the deepest
part of my being, things I would or could never speak to another human. But
that spot ... it coaxes them out ...
The salt air and sounds of the shore, reach their fingers into my being, and
grasp things there I didn't know existed ... and I'm obliged to turn them to
sound, to give substance of voice to validate their importance, not importance
to me or my loves, not to any human or nature or even God, but importance
to the moment ... to existence and its divine principles. (These are the precise things this place stirs within me each time I'm here ... but always mixed with you).
There have been times - times when I went during winter, in stormy weather ...
I love the ocean then the most, it's personality is at its most basic - it's most
visceral: it's strength, it's anger, it's exuberance, it's joy, it's indifference to
humanity, is at its most obvious ... and my significance to myself is never more
potent. There are usually no people there then, and it's as if it's been placed
there for me alone to appreciate ... to savor.
At those times, when there are no others, and the surf is pounding ... the
waves raging against sand and stone, and the gulls are fighting the winds
off-shore, the bell-buoys arguing with the swells, and the fog-horns warning ...
I walk to the end, to our rock, and I stand up on it, and without thinking of
anything but you and your eyes, the way they betrayed your soul the first
time they met mine, your hands, the way God made the spaces between your
fingers fit mine so perfectly ...
Your smile, that makes those "light up a room" clichés seem so inadequate,
that incredible tiny electrical vibration I felt when I touched your skin, (like no
other), and your voice, that never stopped making my heart flip whenever
you'd speak my name, your sigh, a music so sweet and forbidden ... a melody
for me alone, that held me prisoner ... thinking on all that defines what you are
and were and meant, (and the void left behind) ...
I reach down into my soul, to that place that terrifies me, where I'd never go
at any other time, (the place I refuse to see when I consider the mirror each
day ... the place I will always deny), I saturate myself with that dark place and
all that it holds ... all that it hides, and with all my might I tear it from my gut
in a single yell, a sound as primal as my surroundings. Not a scream of terror,
but one of release ... a release of contrition and self-awareness ... a purging
of pain and joy and fear and passion ...
Loss and love and anger and insignificance ... hatred and jealousy, exuberance
and relief ... the longing to feel, and the desire to never feel again ... all my
emotion - negative, positive, ambiguous - the multitude of things I feel that
are beyond expression ... I scrape them from my being with all the force I can
... completely, without regret or wonder, face skyward, I return them to the
places they belong ... carried to nothingness on the ocean winds, (like the
dust I someday will become).
No one can hear ... no thing can hear ... even to me the sound is swallowed
by the surf. The gulls and sandpipers go about their business, (I could be
another of these rocks, and it would matter not to them) ... my loud
proclamations to the sky unrecognized. But to me this little ritual is priceless,
this place as precious as any ... my soul renewed as my breath is spent, (at
least temporarily), my mind as clear as the cloudless sky.
My thoughts are still of you ... us ... there ... magical ... sun dancing as a
million jewels on the waves. Or moonlight hypnotizing us to dream and believe
and feel sure it would never end ... moments so precious, so bathed in
romance that they were eternal ... captured in time, beyond the sobering
brush of reality ... and at those moments, all that mattered ... no thought or
feeling or emotion or thing that wasn't US ... alone but not alone.
(continued)
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