Do you remember that narrow little pathway we followed on those muggy summer nights? Do you remember how it weaved perfectly through the starry blue-berried juniper bushes of your neighbors' yard, just so that neither side, north or south, could notice our trespassing?
We used to navigate through inconveniently cast shadows, drawn on by obnoxious porch lights, while they obfuscated the rocks and roots jutting out from the dirt path where we descended to our own, secret beach.
Do you remember the halo of orange from the city bouncing off the smooth ripples along the night blackened bay? Sure, the water seemed friendly, enclosed in a landscape embrace of city, forest and beach, but it was only a temporary visitor, on its way to that vast, unknowable ocean. It was that ocean, that Atlantic Ocean, that I learned to hold in fearful respect. Day in and day out it dragged the waters of sound and stream from the safety of their watery abodes to the abyss beyond the continental shelf.
But that beach was ours. I remember when you brought me to that beach for the first time. It was probably about 6 months since I had moved from Monterey, but who really counts that sort of time at that age? I just remember that it was late spring, and our school days were showing signs of wear at the edges. In a couple more weeks, we'd be free; free as the waters of the bay into the ocean.
You later told me that when you first saw me, you were disgusted. Navy brat though I was, you hated how much I brought my past life east with me. It wasn't just my clothes - the down jacket I wore in class every day because your early November days were the coldest I had ever felt in my life - you said it was everything, from the way I spoke to my sun-kissed skin. You told me that in those first few weeks, I wore my homesickness like a cloak, and if I spoke at all, I spoke of sand between my toes and the sounds of seals upon the rocks. If I wanted out so badly, you thought privately, I should just go back to California. New England was only for the strong.
But slowly, my classroom reports on life along the golden coast became of interest, and while many of my sentences begun with the phrase, "In California, we..." my stories became a window to another world, one you hadn't considered before. I got you more curious than irritated. The invisible wall I never knew existed finally began to crumble when a class project lumped us together, and finally you learned that I was a person.
I was oblivious to your derision, but perhaps that fact allowed you to dismiss the feeling later when you needed to. No regret, no nostalgia. You simply responded to what you knew. I think later, every time you told me of this story, you secretly loved it, scientist that you are. Your understanding of me had been wrong but you took pleasure learning something new.
Embedded in murmurers about Bunsen burners and dissection scalpels, I told you that more than anything, I missed the ocean. I told you that I missed walking along the rocks and smelling the mild sea breeze and the fragrant response of the cypress and the manzanita. I missed walking on sea saturated sands with my bare feet, forming perfect imprints of every toe detail, and then watching lapping waves erase the evidence that I had ever been.
That afternoon, we skipped our final class and walked all the way to your house.
It was one of the few times I saw the sun and our beach in the same sight. I started to feel my heart drop when we got there. Yours were not the smooth beaches of my memory. Jagged rocks jutted from seemingly everywhere, and various hues of cobbles threatened any barefoot adventurer. But you dug at the cobbles and unearthed some sand, and cupped my hands, smothering a fist full of course sand into my palms. I felt the tiny pebbles slip their way past my fingers like a sieve.
And in a voice just under normal, barely over whispering, you told me, "I've brought you the ocean."
With no reason other than my sublime gratitude, suddenly I loved it. This ocean, this Atlantic Ocean, with its salty smell hanging more heavily in the air, it's waters rougher and darker than that of the mild Pacific, and small rocky beaches, hidden away from the world, unwelcoming to all but those who needed no welcome. It was the perfect place to learn about you, and myself on those dark summer nights.
There was that one time we went, after we had escaped the rusting metal, greasy vendors and salty sweet smells of the waterfront carnival the town put on every year. That was the first time I found out you smoked. Do you know how much you threw my world upside-down that night? How you cracked my carefully constructed sense of the line between what I knew of goodness and despair, of the wall that separated that which held promise, and that which was forsaken.
How could it be? I pondered to myself. My sheltered world I knew no longer made sense. You were smart. You were fair, honest and rational. Those with intelligence, those who were going places, going to see the world, knew better than to smoke. At least that was what the posters said.
You said you planned to quit at age 27. Why age 27? I never asked, though I think I know now. Until age 27, you knew you'd be immortal. You knew that until the age of 27, you'd live forever and you'd still be travelling the universe with eyes unshackled by decay. I wonder if you are still smoking? I wonder if you are still immortal?
But I gained more from you than the mere shattering of my simplistic world. In our limited time together, we explored the cosmos with our words, pondered the injustice of a civilization based on justice, examined the fine line between knowledge and fantasy.
I remember one night in late August, the last month we had together before we began our final year in high school. That's when I realized that when we headed of to college, going our separate ways, life without you was going to be as strange as that move from Monterey that was forced upon me so many years prior.
I sat upon a large boulder of granite, feet submerged in the gentle lapping tide. I never tired of this. Monterey knew little of summer and heat, but the hot days of summer I knew from family camping trips in Yosemite were poor teachers of a New England summer. Hot days persisted into hot nights, instead of being vaporized by cloudless skies. But here, to my continued delight, sunshine or darkness, the water was comfortably warm. To feel my skin surrounded by a loving watery embrace under the starry sky, knowing the cold of space away from the warmth of the sun, gave me hope that even during the darkest moments of our lives we might find oceans of life where the water was still warm.
You asked me about the future. You asked me about my future.
I was bland, reciting the list of colleges I was going to visit and the studies I was thinking of pursuing. The future seemed like some far off tomorrow that threatened to arrive, but never quite did; something we all knew was a farce anyway. I barely knew what I was doing, but the adults of my life had given me a good enough script to play the part well.
You told me you were going to become the foremost pimp north of the Mason-Dixon. I laughed. Lucky at love you were not, though you had your own sweet charm. You didn't crack a smile, but I knew you were laughing on the inside.
The moon reflected in smoothness of the bay and I played with my toes, making new ripple patterns that broke its light into pieces. That night, a near full moon, it lit up the whole sky. Your voice didn't change when you smoothly announced that you had met a girl earlier that summer. You were thinking of moving in with her at the end of school.
You were staying here? You weren't going to university? I sat still swirling my toes in the water, thinking of my shock, but not saying a word.
I didn't need to say a thing. Whether you knew what I was thinking, or you had grown accustomed of others in your life disparaging your choices, I don't know, but you said, "When she first slept over, she left a sweatshirt behind. I tried to return it to her, but she told me to keep it. That way, the next time she stayed over, she'd had something to keep her warm. That scared me." you admitted. "My hand was played. At the very least, there was going to at least be one more next time that she'd be there. I didn't want her to get so close. I was so afraid of losing myself, of letting her in." you relayed to me your fears as if you were reliving them all over again. But whatever hold those fears had on you, melted when you said, "I just never knew a person could be so amazing."
I had never been in love before, so I didn't recognize it in you. If I had, would I have said something differently? I don't know.
"She is just so perfect." you confided to me.
"What is so amazing about her?" I asked honestly. Could she hit a baseball at 80 miles per hour? Did she speak 5 languages including Arabic and Chinese? Did she master Advanced Calculus? Any of those qualities would have been amazing to me.
It was only thanks to the moonlight that I saw your furrowed eyebrows. But you forgave me for my indignities. "I can't explain it. You just have to know."
It was a weird answer coming from you. You, who as we debated the inevitability of
existential nihilism in modern society, never failed to demand the full articulation of every thought I lobbed at you. You, who prized clear thought and demanded a defense of any assertion, were casting a hazy fog on your own behavior.
"Oh." I conceded defeat quickly, unwilling to drag out the uncomfortable situation; something you would have normally chided me for. I looked up at the stars, or rather, those that had survived the journey of billions of miles in space in addition to that of the orange shield; the glow of the city. They always looked so few and lonely to me compared to the abundant stars I'd see camping in Yosemite. But in that moment, those stars and I shared a misery, to see friends so clearly, yet to be light years away from any kindred spirit.
"Anyway," you told me, changing the subject "I'm still going to school. I'm not that stupid. I'll just be local and commute."
I never learned exactly how this girl was so amazing. That was our last trip to that beach that summer. We were mostly in separate classes that year. When I think back to that time, it seems like there's a gap in my memory, where you would have been. But it isn't that my life was empty. Far from it. Those twilight days of my childhood sped past me as I watched those last few months in New England turn from reality into memory.
I got the impression that it was time for girls my age to get interested in boys my age, so I started dating too. My own efforts led to no boys that could hit a baseball at 80 miles an hour, nor speak 5 languages, nor master Advanced Calculus, but they helped force me through an unspoken ritual that initiated me into the world of adults.
But I got a call from you that winter vacation. "Meet me at the beach in an hour." you said and that was all I needed to hear. It was an overcast day, where the greyness of the rippling clouds reflected in the ripples of the grey waters, making it seem as if heaven and ocean extended into infinity. It was one of those winter days when your skin feels stretched and brittle, scoured and windswept from the crystalline air, so I made every attempt to cover my exposed face with a woolen scarf of plaid. We did not need the cold of the night sky to chill our bones further, so we huddled in the muffled sunlight of a wintry afternoon.
"She's pregnant." was all you told me before the smell of slowly incinerating cloves reached my nostrils."
I elected to concentrate my efforts on seeing if I could manage a cloud of frost breath through the scarf I was wearing.
You turned to me. "Are you even listening?"
I nodded. I was, of course. But the only thing I could think of was all the wasted talent. High grades in physics and chemistry didn't pay for diapers. Not while we were so young.
"The baby is due in late August. I don't know the first thing about being a father. I don't get why this happened." I ended my frost breathing experiments and looked at you with new eyes. For the first time, I saw a kid, scared of adulthood. Where I once saw my guide and mentor into the cold culture of the northeast, I saw someone as lost as I had ever been.
"I guess I'm lucky." you said, but your charisma had been scraped raw by the recent events and your words sounded hollow. "Her dad is going to let me work at his insurance office. So my kid won't be destitute."
I winced at that most of all. In the span of five minutes you had turned from wise friend, to scared child, to walking corpse. Your life was over, at least as far as I knew.
And suddenly I missed our philosophical discussions at our summertime beach. Somehow, all those things we talked about, those grandiose theories on life and the universe seemed trivial compared to the story of one lone homo sapian in the history of human kind; your story. What is the death of a star in comparison to the short changed dreams I had for you?
But whereas before we'd talk out the silly thoughts going through my head, bringing them to a purifying daylight, I said not a word, and those thoughts festered into pity. It was a pity that I used to retroactively paint every memory I had of you. It was a pity you neither asked for, nor wanted. But it was a pity you also were never aware of, so it was never exposed and laughed away.
"Who knows. Maybe after a year or so you'll have saved up enough to get back on track. It doesn't have to be hopeless." I finally spoke. But not an ounce of my words were said for your benefit, I realize now. They were said for mine.
"No." you said, with a new resolve. "It doesn't."
We stayed there for an hour or so, with the edge in your voice slowly being worn down to a smooth calm. We talked about how maybe one day you'd bring your kid here, to this beach under the stars, and talk with him about life and the universe. My stomach turned at that thought. The beach was ours and to be unfaithful to me, even to your own flesh and blood, made me feel robbed. But again, I did not say anything. I simply starting drawing shapes and patterns with the heat of my fingertips on the frost covering the granite.
But by the time we left that day, I was feeling better to have seen you and our beach as we had a hundred times before. Though the glow behind the grey blanket of clouds above us had dimmed by the time we left, I felt warmer. I wasn't going to watch you change the world, but that day I did watch you don a cloak of humanity. You had me in your confidence, and while I understood that the nature of our relationship was going to be forever different, now we were truly friends. Equals.
Spring came and went and as graduation loomed in the near future, we started meeting again at our beach. By then I had grown to more than simply love a New England spring, I had become addicted to the feeling of a summer long promise of new life after surviving an unforgiving winter.
I had come to understand the world differently in the 5 years I had been an New Englander, I realized. Like the ebbing and flowing of the seasons, the theme of hardship and renewal was ever present. It calmed me, I realized. Sure, I had grown to understand that as much as I may have longed for the warmth of summer in the dead of winter, joy in late spring soon turned to oppression of humid July and August, and though during those months thoughts of arctic refuge, the relief of a cool fall soon led to frozen toes and icicle tears. But so too, packaged in those private miseries, was a promise: Spring was just around the corner; the refreshing breezes of Autumn were not far away. Nothing is permanent. Neither fire nor ice.
And when I came to the conclusion that our friendship had very much followed this model: closeness and distance, encouragement and disappointment, it gave a sense of stability that only comes with accepting the wild unknown that is life. Though there would be times that we did not speak, though there was a time that you hated me, or ignored me, and perhaps, you'd give away our secret beach to someone who could never understand its significance, there would always be a spring, just around the corner. We'd always be tied together, we'd always make up a part of each other: me in you, and you in me.
You didn't speak of your child to me in those final weeks of our own youth. Whatever had scared you so in the winter melted away with the promise of a new Spring. But no longer did we find ourselves climbing separate branches of a tree, or perching on opposing rocks when we chatted at our beach. Something had changed that winter, and suddenly we were sitting side-by-side.
I remember that one night, where talk had turned to exhaustion, and in the hour we had left, we dozed under Cassiopeia's benevolent gaze. It was always much easier to make out her stately "W" in the light polluted sky, rather than the populated skies of Yosemite that I had recalled from my childhood camping trips. That was how I knew she was watching, and remembering. If we failed to remember our friendship, surely she'd remind us.
So it was no doubt that she saw me curl up into your arms. And it is certain that she saw you pull my shoulders close to your chest. And in that way we remained until your cell phone alarm began to screech a half hour later. You got up, dusted yourself off, and mumbled something about "paperwork mines". We never spoke of what had happened that night. Not to each other, not to anyone. It is the one thing in the universe that is our knowledge and ours alone.
Your touch was a warm day in Spring. Intimate, caring and comfortable, but I knew better than to expect anything further, and nor did I want to. Only the claustrophobic smothering of a dense, hot summer air followed the joys of Spring. So I was not surprised when it did not happen again.
Summer held us apart for other reasons too. You shed your motor-board for an oversize suit and tie, and joined the cubical serfdom your child's grandfather had offered you. While I spent those last few months of New England enjoying the company of friends, and flirted with the world through a variety of adventures, your world had been crammed into a box made of plaster board.
We made it to our beach three times that summer. The first, was to celebrate our graduation. We smuggled a box of cheap wine and I saw a silly side of you I had never seen before. For two hours we delved into the finer details of what we thought the British meant by the words "wanker" and "poofter", and we argued passionately about just how large the largest domestic cat in the world was. And we laughed. We squeezed 4 years of laughter between friends into one night.
The second time was in early July. Night offered little refuge from the heat, but neither of us stayed long enough to commiserate.
"It's time to stop being children." you said. I laughed. You had often railed about the arbitrariness of the line drawn between children and adults. You'd often lamented about how much adults thought they knew more than they did, and how little they appreciated the developed minds of our age cohort. So surely, your words had to have been in jest.
But you continued, "I don't have time for this anymore. I've got less than 2 months to learn how to be a father, and here I am acting like a high schooler."
I laughed, more out of shock than amusement. "I didn't realize the past month and a half had imbued us the wisdom of the ages! Chill out."
"I'm not joking. You have no idea what my life has been like these past few weeks. You haven't a clue what it means to have someone depend on you. I'm not doing this anymore!" The rock you had been worrying in the palm of your hand made a splash as you threw it into into the shallow waters of the beach, before turning around and storming off.
That time, we didn't leave the beach together. As I listened to the cobbles crunch beneath your shoes, I sat, throwing acorns into the bay, using the best of my vision to follow them as they floated along the current. I wondered how long it would take for a tree sprout to look around and see nothing but a lonely ocean for miles.
I was hurt. This was the darkest winter I had faced with you by far, and I felt helpless to stop it. I was sure that the Spring would indeed come, but I worried. I was going to university before the end of the summer, back to Monterey to be near my grandmother while I studied "Human Communication", whatever that meant. I feared that Spring would come, and I would not be here to witness it.
I knew that I had to end this fimbulwinter myself, or it would be doomed to go on forever. "Meet me at our beach." I said through a text less than a week before my cross-country voyage. Somehow, you neither ignored me nor chastised me for dragging you back into my so-called immature world. You gave me two letters, and that was all I needed.
"Ok."
I waited for you, sitting with legs in the lapping water and a book in hand in case you decided last minute to avoid me afterall. One way or another, I was going to make my last memory at this beach, a good one.
I heard cobbles crunch beneath your feet as I ritualistically turned pages in my novel, and a let the feel of the of the grainy weave rub against my fingers deliberately before ending my date with Proust.
It was strange. We had last seen each other only a month prior. We had gone for months during school when we'd do little more than wave a hello from across the hall. But time does not pass in the same way when you've been sentenced. "I missed you, so very much." you whispered huskily into my ear. "You don't know how much I have missed you."
Your breathe smelled of cheap vodka and I could tell you had been smoking. You were standing on the precipice of a life you did not ask for, but that you were determined to meet. The pressure was wearing at you.
You gave me an intimate embrace; a deep, all-encompassing hug that had me trapped, but gave me no incentive to leave. Seconds passed by like hours, and it seemed an eternity had gone by when I raised my eyes to you and spoke.
"You will remember me fondly when I leave?"
I recognized the look in your eyes. I had seen it before in some of the boys I had dated in my final year of high school. I saw that hunger to find a connection that surpassed all other forms. I saw those boys mistake that for lust. I had seen myself mistake it for lust, but it was something far more primal.
Months of practice had given me an instinctual reaction to your silent cues. I brought my lips to yours and waited, having been convinced some time ago that it was my role to wait for your move. Don't worry, I grew out of that. But you did respond that time as your lips pressed passionately onto mine. Beneath the grainy smoke of cloves and your sugar shit alcohol breath, I could taste the ocean on your tongue. The Atlantic Ocean.
I knew then that would be the last time I ever talked to you. I knew that though spring had come, and though I had been there to witness it, it was fleeting as always. The oppression of our distance would cast into a mold our memories. As autumn turned to winter, I could not be assured that your face would put an end to the cold, but I'd forever have these last memories of you to keep me warm.
I want you to know that there was a time when I talked of you to others, fondly. Any close friend in my next 4 years of university learned about the bricks you built in me to make me the woman I am today. I even spoke of you to every boyfriend, though each telling of our discussions at our beach became shorter, and more abridged, until they turned to lip service designed solely for myself. But words of you in me never made it to either of my girlfriends.
But sometimes, as I gaze out on Monterey Bay, listening to the seals I find myself wandering back to those outings of ours, if only in my mind. I've never forgotten your ocean, or the sanctuary of our beach together. I still remember the taste of salt in your breath and the dim stars that watched us that evening. But I've made a new sanctuary, founded a new beach, and when we kiss, my wife reminds that there is more to life than the choppy waters of life along the Atlantic. The taste of the Pacific on her lips are enough to let me know that I've come home.
