We Were Here

You know, I never once tired of them, the swimmers at sunrise. I never once failed to sit here in slack-jawed awe as their little buoys blinked in the near dark, gliding through the ocean water as if the sea were their home. It always stunned me, even today; on the last of days in this place, I sat here wondering how and why. I’ve tried for days to write about what this place means to me, but nothing does it justice. I’ve laughed and said it’s time; I’ve stayed up late and watched the moonrise. I’ve eaten dinner on the beach with friends, fingers sticky and sandy children clinging to our legs. I’ve chased my son through the waves, thrown the frisbee for the dog, drank a bottle of wine, made love, written poems, and made another cup of tea. I’ve said goodbye in all the ways I know how.

It might be the sound of the water that I will miss more than anything else. The absence of the sound, I didn’t realize until now, it is an opening in my life that I have been trying to fill for the past year as I slowly let go of this home. I haven’t written here because I don’t know what to say anything without it. But, I’m going to try again.

I’ve been telling people lately that I want another son and that I’ll name him Hawk. I can feel his presence circling my life in these months. I pray that he’s coming. This time, I say, I want to throw myself into motherhood, so I intentionally lose the contours of real life, and the shoreline disappears. This time, I want to be nothing else.

A part of me thought we’d never leave this apartment. I joked about going down with the ship. Had morbid fantasies about dying young, ex-lovers visiting me while I stared out at the blue abyss. The last thing I’ll ever see. I shouldn’t say that out loud. But it’s my point, I haven’t been saying enough out loud. Isn’t that the whole reason for writing: to say the things we maybe shouldn’t say unless it’s still the dark of night and we’re watching the swimmers swim?

Last night, while I was not sleeping, a part of me thought, I can’t do this, I can’t leave. And the other part of me laughed and said, of course, you can, you’ve done this before. Sometimes we need to call on the people we have been in order to be the person we need to be right now. I am so much stronger than I ever give ourselves credit for. How many times have we packed the car and driven away? At eighteen, I left my parents’ home in Minnesota and moved to California. And then I packed up every bit of my life there and moved to Idaho, alone, to study writing. And then 4 years later, when I said goodbye to that life, I drove back to California with the rug on the roof of my car. Or how about when I had to leave a man I loved and drove south down the coast, pulling over only to cry on the side of a strawberry field? How many times do we do this? Only this time, I am not alone.

It might sound silly and sentimental and spoiled to some to grieve a place, just a place so wholly, but this place has been ours since we met. It’s where we fell in love and lived those still young years, and where we weathered the pandemic, whispered about babies, and made a baby and raised a baby into a little boy. This stretch of sand holds too much. He used to come here years before we met; his friend lived in this apartment, and on one of our first dates, he brought me here to his birthday party. We had no idea it would be ours. He used to sit down on that beach and meditate on what his life might fold into and who might come and make that life with him. I knew I loved him when he brought me here, and we lay in the sand eating hazelnut chocolate and raspberries, kissing like there was no one else in the entire world.

Perhaps it’s something I will unpack later, what place can do to us, for us. How we are woven with the beach grass and will always have sand in our shoes. I don’t know.

All I can say is that the sun has come up, and the world is a silky dream-like muted blue, a thin line where the two hues meet at the horizon, the only thing splitting the sea from the sky. Two birds fly over the water, so near to it they could disappear. For the past five days, there has been a swell so big that the waves shake the windows, but now, it’s gone, and the water is more familiar, slowly rolling toward the shore in small lazy crests. The tide is high and coming up, that you can always count on.