Footprints in the mind

Just some things I've been thinking about as the end of high school approaches. Basically my feelings and my fears put into words and a setting.

The air smelt of smoke and salt. The sand felt cold and wet under her bare feet. She could hear the laughter and the cracking sound of burning logs behind her but it felt far away. The sound of the crashing waves felt realer somehow, but maybe it was just because she could feel the spray on her cheeks and not the warmth of the flames. She tightened her quilt around her arms. Someone must have picked up her guitar. Each note seemed to echo on for longer than usual. She choked up recognizing what had been her favorite song three years ago. She didn’t move to wipe the tears that ran down her cheeks. They were so cold she couldn’t feel the paths every tear created anyway.

All of them were singing now, trying desperately to recall the lyrics that were buried under three years’ worth of other songs and other memories. Almost separate lives, she thought. Like they were so different from the people they were back then that the memories felt more like stories than personal experiences. The tears stopped falling and the ocean breeze was drying them one strong gust of wind at a time. She dug her toes into the sand. She had been standing there long enough to start sinking into feet-shaped holes. Too bad they would be gone the moment she stepped away from that particular patch of sand.

It’s all a metaphor, she thought; the beach bonfire, the old songs, the momentary footprints, the tears, the waves facing her and slowly edging closer. The water was time, and more specifically September. It had been lurking around right in front of her for a while now; just never quite close enough to get her wet. But it was the last week of summer break and soon the ocean would be miles away from her but she would be facing another sea of unknown: college. She would hear new songs, make new memories, memorize new lyrics to sing accompanied by her guitar late into the night. And nights like these would be stories told by a stranger.

But she wanted to remember. She couldn’t bear to forget. To not recall the way the sand was soft and humid, even in the summer. Or the way it felt when they all sang together; raw voices colliding with soft ones, the light strums of a guitar providing the song’s only solace. Even this " the tears and the cold " she wanted to be able to feel forever. Because that was the big problem, not remembering faces or places. It all came down to what she was feeling, what she had felt. She could not remember how it had felt to walk into her high school for the first time, or if her heart had skipped a beat or not when Roger Pawn had asked her to her first homecoming; which was scary, because what she did remember was that fourteen year old her had talked about it for months. And now, that girl who had danced the night away and had her first real kiss was like a character in your favorite book: so close yet so far, living things that might have happened to you, but living in another universe all the same.

And suddenly she couldn’t take it anymore. Sitting there, crying, trying desperately to remember would not solve anything. To remember, she needed to live. She needed to feel things worth remembering and impossible to forget. And then maybe she wouldn’t need tangible proof of what she had felt to stay in the sand. She let the quilt slide to the ground just as the first wave reached her feet. Then she ran. She ran away from the fire and the old song, away from the heat and the smoke, into the dark, deep, cold ocean. And it felt wonderful. 

Author's Note

Do you think this is too cheesy?

Reviews

[Shannon]

Storied like this, that hint at something more, but don't come out and say it, always create two feelings for me. Admiration at the ability of the writing to create something that tells us enough to understand but not to know. And the desire to understand exactly what is going on.

Your descriptive language rings very true!