July 2017

You’ve fallen in love. A mile long stretch of beach in your favorite season. You did not want to come here. You can’t imagine yourself leaving. An unfamiliar ocean welcomes you home for the first time. Tiny seashells litter the bay and match the ones rattling around in your heart. This is where you were always meant to be. You’re leaving tomorrow– supposedly– a plane stealing you away like a thief in the early dawn. Tomorrow is a far-off time. You can never come back, not in the way you want to. Not in a way that matters.

There’s a cliff overlooking the shore, about three miles down. You walked there with your dad, both in flip flops that blistered the in-between of your toes, thirty minutes each way. Sitting on the grassy overlook, watching the ants-disguised-as-people surfing and walking the beach, you feel expansive, untouchable. You point out a new mole on your father’s hand, and the reality that waits back home sneaks up on you again, robs you of the ocean’s peace. This trip is for taking snapshots, for memories that can be laminated and ruminated on those days you’ll miss him most. It was one of the best gifts he could have given you.

This place has changed you fundamentally. You were allowed, for one short moment of un-supervision, to want something more than you were scripted for. You’ve grown into more of the person you want to be. You feel more like yourself than you’ve ever been– more than you ever had the courage to show yourself. Quietly, you thank the last magnificent sunset over the ocean, overwhelming your eyes in shades of orange and red. You have to say goodbye. You could never say goodbye. It has become a part of you, snuck up and grew around you in a fond embrace like an old friend. The home you can never have, a place too far from what family should be and what you want yourself to want to be. The part you were casted for has a way of paling in the light of a sunset on the water. There is no way you can have both here. You have to go back, at least for now. While you still feel lost, there’s the contentment that being a sacrificial lamb affords.

Instead you stay at the beach, waves brushing the tops of your feet till dark. Your first adventure, encapsulated in a mile stretch of beach and sand. The longing of wanting to return crashes into you before you’ve even left. It is good that the flight is before the sun realizes you’re gone, the drowsiness of early morning will help to mask the hurt of having to say your last goodbye.

Basil McQuade is a writer in Old Bridge, NJ. They're a long-time member of the Wretched Poets’ Society workshop and Oxford comma fan club. Their work is influenced by grief and the hunt for understanding. They are interested in processing emotion without intellectualizing. You can find them on Instagram (@basilpestofestowrites).