Shedding Skin

I went there as a young man, a vacationer, seeking to fill some void, or to create one where flotsam and bullshit cluttered my busy brain.

There was the beach, a half-mile of toe-burning sand, curved in a great cove like some fisheye vision that might well have been a thousand miles on a misty morning; and the surf, waves that might have licked into life on some rocky coast in Ireland. There was the sun, lording over all, casting the landscape in ores and gems whether it was peak season or deepest winter.

There were a thousand thousand gulls with a taste for greasy French fries and a thousand thousand children with that very same appetite and same scream. There was the scent of sunscreen and the stench of seaweed. There was love, and romance novels by the score to tease lovers in their pudgy, awkward skin.

There was the clam shack that bisected the beach, and the jutting stone jetty that pointed sailors to the BEST LOBSTER ROLL AROUND!  Squint right from the picnic tables and striped umbrellas and there, stoic houses squatted in grim defiance of the mighty sea. Look left and there in the distance stood the lighthouse.

It spoke to me, all of it, sun and sand and wind and wave, and it speaks to me still, murmured whispers filling empty moments in traffic.

At night, I was drawn to the lighthouse, where all of the polished wonder of the day would seem at once garish and gaudy. There at the lighthouse, the waves hushed to rumbles and gurgles. There the gulls tucked bills and dreamed dreams of ketchup and clamcakes. There, at night, crane upward to see a sea of stars deeper than synapses can hold. There I was nearly lost in the inscrutable black, in the myriad stars splayed out like impossible equations. Nearly, save for the nebulous vulva of the Milky Way splitting the black in a sinewy streamer of plum, if only on the clearest midnights.

There I settled. There I lost only what I had come to shed, found only what I brought with me.