-1. There are moments which play in your mind again and again at different intervals and in different seasons. As you age, they remain the same and continue to loop through your awareness. As age accumulates, the story and its possibility still beckon.
The breeze picks up. He’s been taking steps across the sand. Having forgotten his flip flops or any change of clothing, his pant legs are rolled up and his feet bare, as the sun sinks into the grains. The breeze picks the sand into the air, the way in those moments free of worry, forced focus, and other forms of stress, the mind picks at memories. He breathes in, filling the depth of his lungs. He closes his eyes and lets the salty air wash over him like the waves against the shore. Then, like an echo that has survived the sound tunnel of time, he hears it. It seems a little unfamiliar at first. The way images are unfamiliar as the lens focuses. It trickles into his consciousness like droplets before the deluge. And then he recognizes it, or almost recognizes it. As a memory, it lacks any connection to concrete truth and it takes him some time to find other echoes of memory which can inform this one. And yet they all feel so unreal. The ethereal nature of dreams. He wonders then, before he gives to a smile, if this is what she left. That laughter which the moment reminds him of. It is the moment, the applauding waves, the salty air, the grains pressing into his heels that allow the echo breath. He laughs, keeping his eyes closed. The sound ricochets along the narrow synaptic passages of his mind, and his memory becomes saturated with scenes recreated from what could be gathered after, of moments when the laughter was more than just an echo. The sun continues to pour down on the grains of sand. He presses his eyelids. Sometimes moments are too much because they’re too far. With another breath full of salt air he opens his eyes and is struck by the light. He allows himself to sink into the beach, until he is seated staring out at the blue green swells and their white edges. There’s a sadness to his gaze as his eyes mist. When he was younger, the laughter was more laughter and less echo. It was as if whatever she left, then, was still whole. Enough for this one last memory which comes back to him now, the way flash floods inundate landscapes. It’s the same moment he would go to sleep to, often, the weeks and months after she left. It’s been years since. Nearly decades. It’s hard to reconstruct anything around the scene, the memory, the echo. It is hard enough to unearth the color and emotion woven into the memory. With so much that was once there, and so much now created and recreated, he almost wishes he could step onto the white ridges crashing and cascading onto the beach and step back into that moment.