Friday, February 13, 2015

beach night

Sitting on the couch after everyone’s gone to bed.  Locusts and waves the only sound – the week behind living in you.  Your skin’s new shade the only outward proof.  Your favorite book has been on a shelf here all along, and as you pick it up and reacquaint yourself with the old friend, the stillness sets in.  The wholeness, the culmination of it all.  This is what you break your heart for.  What you lay awake for. What you put on a face and go to battle every day for.

It’s all worth it for this moment right now – sitting next to coolers full of leftover food waiting to be crammed back into cars traveling north.  Next to trash bags full of bottles and cardboard awaiting the curb.  The signs of having lived a week with the most important humans in the world.  The luck of it all.  It’s the calm before the storm – but also the ending really.  Because nothing will ever be this way again.  And even more than the melancholy that brings, there’s a beauty in it.   A unique truth to it; that next year won’t and can’t be the same.  Nothing ever will.  This moment in time is all its own.

Someday you’ll look back at pictures and something will spark in your being.  And maybe you won’t remember the exact words spoken, but you’ll remember the feeling.  You’ll remember the fears.  What you wanted.  WHO you wanted – and you’ll take comfort that you were.  That you are.  That the two versions are existing simultaneously right now, and by all means will continue.

We require such landmarks in life.  To bring us back.  Away from subways and spreadsheets and bars of strangers.  To ground us with the large smallness of nature and familial love.  But also to serve as a stake in the ground when we’ve lost our identities in the noise and motion.  Our minds scanning backwards…skipping over the anonymous moments, we land on this quiet little pocket when we really were.

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