Winter, at the edge of the world.
Wind whips across the water as tendrils of icy air grab hold of sand particles.
Tiny crystals of frozen water sting the face, joining little fists of air wrapped around jagged grains of sand.
Light drains from day, and is determined to leave a mark, a memory.
A streak of amber would-be-warmth if the rest of the world wasn’t conspiring entirely against it.
The carcass of a seagull, desiccated and hollow, sits forlornly on the beach – a veritable embodiment of the shells our bodies are. At odds with all other memories of seagulls, and a disconcerting juxtaposition of all my memories of beaches, it somehow brings peace to us.
We stand at the edge of the world – the fist of Cape Cod’s armlike peninsula – and the ocean quietly crashes around us. A winter beach, for those of us who only visit in the summer, is an unexpectedly beautiful bit of desolation.
Brutally ruinous winter has ravaged this crux of land and sea, sending tourists to warmer climes and natives to their hearths, while we stand unbothered and alone in the wind and the sand and the flying flotsam of ice and salty water. The tip of the tongue can still taste life in the air that way – in its salty, mineral, most basic elements – clinging to the chapped lips and waiting to be devoured.
There, with the entire world and twenty years ahead of and behind me, the sea birds soar beyond the beach that still holds their missing brethren. A fleeting thought of panic rises, when it all feels useless and futile, then it falls away as the ocean laps gently, as the wind takes pause, as the sun feels like it will return after all.
In the winter of 2003, I started writing it down here.
I still feel the panic.
I still feel…
ALANIAGAN.com ~ 20 years and counting.
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