Riding shotgun, heading northeast on Ashley Street with you, a swarm of memories of the solitary experiences I had grown accustomed to when I first moved to this town began to engulf me.
You are so new to me, you don't know any of that stuff about me, and it kind of stings, but it is also quite freeing. Holding your hand as we walked toward the ocean, down the abandoned and closed off road, I remembered how years ago, walking down this same stretch of unkempt asphalt, I had gone off into the dunes to pee - an episode that ultimately resulted in a few nasty fire ant bites on my feet.
When we arrived at the shore, you had been quieted by my mumblings of recollections. "Don't take off your shoes in the dunes, there are thorns and burrs all throughout the sand", I had warned you. Up and over the last dune, as my first glimpse of the blue Atlantic unfolded, I immediately panicked. I had lured you to this spot with a vivid description of the wind-worn trees that lined the shore opposite the lighthouse.
Hastily, I looked from left to right, but I did not see the trees that I had remembered. I worried that it would make you trust me less the next time I remembered something beautiful that I wanted to share with you. But, as we began to walk toward the west side of the beach, there they were - just as stark and faint and weathered-gray as they had endured in my memory. The bare trees, the broken limbs, the twisted remnants of living things that present to be so completely dead, one wonders how they stay erect in the sand. Storm after storm.
I thought you seemed uncomfortable with the situation. I wanted terribly to kiss your plump, pink mouth, but your eyes darted from one stranger to the next. Incidentally, 4 different sets of professional photographers had chosen this spot. They were photographing 4 different sets of people wearing khaki pants and white shirts, or white sun dresses, with the ocean wind blowing back their hair in perfect accordance with such a picturesque scene.
Ever since I had fallen inlove with you - last October, in the evening, once I had slowed down enough to watch you from accross the room - I have wanted to share these beauties with you. Parts of me, the best parts of me, the most harmonious and least embattled parts of me; I wanted you to see those parts of me, so that, in some way, I could know they still exist.
All efforts leading to this point, and there we were, on the furthest shore of Folly Beach, looking at an old, red and white lighthouse; me, wanting to pull you around to the river side of the island, and you, offering to go the other direction. So I followed you and we lay a large towel down on the sand and opened our Coronas.
"Cheers, to the blue sea", I said. You clinked your bottle against mine and we drank as the westward wind threw sand down the beach, and the waves crashed into a set of large, dark brown rocks.
Tide was subsiding, so we sat in newly wet shore to avoid being sand-blasted.
I wanted so badly to share with you the whole array of memories I have of the island. For instance, I wanted to tell you about the day in late October, while in a state of heart break and feeling trapped, I came to this end of the island and nobody else was around. I tore off my clothes, except for my white thong underwear, and ran into the crashing waves. I wanted to tell you that it was cold and stormy on that day, but the water was still warm, retaining photonic energy that had been poured into it from April through September. I wanted to tell you that my tears fell into the saltwater, and how beautiful and alive it made me feel to experience the purity of that moment - when there was not one person alive in the world who knew, or even would care to know, the real and full woman that I had become. Yet, the sea was there, enveloping me, holding me adrift, tossing me up and down, consoling me.
Or, I could have told you about the time in late September one year, when I was driving northeast on Ashley Street, and from accross the marsh flitting toward, over, and beyond the peaks of the ocean were thousands of orange Queen butterflies. I could have told you that, in that moment, I found myself weeping from the sheer power and awe of the natural world. Deeply thankful, and thunderstruck, that I could have been so blessed as to find myself at that place, at that exact time, so captivated by that wild, genetically encoded migration over an entire ocean. Into the winter, into oblivion, the butterflies fluttered en masse. A phenomenon that looked like God had shaken orange confetti over the island to celebrate the beginning of autumn.
Instead, however, I was quiet and listened to your stories and laughed at your jokes, and admired your subtle, yet poignant beauty cast against this background so familiar, it fit like my favorite pair of old blue jeans. There you were, and there I was with you, not something I would have ever imagined at any point on the continuum that lies between my life before meeting you, and my life now.
I never would have imagined that, at the age of 30, I would find myself wildly inlove, caught unaware by someone as mysterious and gorgeous as you are. I never would have dreamt I could experience something as uniquely delightful as the surprising way you stir me in the most ordinary of settings, saying and doing the most ordinary things. Your blue eyes, and the blue saltwater; your unfathomable nature, and the unknown depths of that deep, cold sea; you drinking a beer, sitting beside me.
Thank you for giving me new memories of the sand and the storm clouds and the crashing, foam-blasting, unpredictable ocean. You don't know this about me, so I am going to tell you; those moments, there with you, were the closest to home that I will ever be.
