A quietness comes over her, and the sand feels soft today. The waves don’t seem as angry, suddenly, and the taste returns to her lips. Dry, and salty, biting at her calmness.
Her skin absorbs the warmth of the sunset and a cool breeze takes a nap on her shoulders. No need to want to cry, today, just restful breath. The beach has always brought her peace, the water runs inside her. She walks across the white wash, cool, grainy. The hems of her pants are heavy, weighted down by the wet sand that’s found its way above the waves. The towel draped over her shoulder smells of summer and she remembers…
Her thighs tighten from the tired day of walking and she wonders, what happened? Why the loss has always found it’s time and love, somehow finds itself numb. There must be a time when life and love rely wholly on one another and cannot survive without the other.
No?
She's a hopeless romantic. She sits, and thinks, breathing in the last moments of day. The ocean is so big, so terrifyingly big. Her eyes passing over the now blackening blue.
“Sometimes I feel like I could walk right out there, over the glassy top, and fall right off the edge.”
She falls back into the sand instead, and for a moment realizes the feigning warmth beneath her. The sand holds the sun, as a pear holds a grain.
Her eyelids fall closed...
Her fingers dig, deeply, and hold, tight. As if trying to wring out the rock... she squeezes.
She smiles shyly, feeling tiny, and so calm.
The world is truly magnificent here, without any people to take away the beauty. Just the earth beneath her, and the stars.
Applause in sparkling splendor.
If only she could walk alone, just like this, and always be safe. To lay here, beneath the pin pricks…
The world has so much beauty, peace, and magnificence. It does appear, and a breath can be taken, free of punishment, and fear.
The air begins its journey into coolness and it gets wetter with every passing moment. That smell, the smell of the beach, the salt in the air and the sand, drenched. It’s unlike any other. It’s one of those smells that makes your heart warm, like the smell of towels drying in the dryer, freshly cut grass, or the smell of hot earth steaming after a summer rain shower.
She remembers the smell of her mother’s hair spray and the chlorine from the indoor pool at school. Smells, no one can take them from you, a memory you can always visit, a memory that comes, without permission, no matter where you are.
Her ankles start to numb as the cold air realizes her wet hems, if only this one moment could last a little while longer. If only her heart was warm again, and she could hold the hand of yesterday, one more time..
She sits back up, wraps her warm hands around her ankles, then begins the walk home.
She is leaving an old friend tonight and realizing a love lost.
“Time is my only real enemy…”
She thinks and listens to the waves whisper. The froth washing her steps away, and forgiving the path left behind.
The beach...
She will always have the beach.