She lifts her head up ever so slightly enough for the beach to resemble desert terrain. From her perspective the scalloped sand seems endless. As she lifts her head up higher the boardwalk comes into view. People bike, skate, and jog along – a peaceful scene from afar. To her left, California’s coast slumps lazily along the horizon until it seems to collapse into the sparkling Pacific with exhaustion, like a dog lifelessly basking in the midday sun. She feels the heat and gets up and stomps toward the water. The dry sand quickly becoming harder and wet as she pushes toward the cool Pacific. Her feet walk directly into the foamy water lapping the shore and she pushes onward, dragging her calves and then thighs through the water while shuffling her feet until she’s waist deep. An incoming wave looms and she disappears under the green and blue. Her head pops up in the middle of white foam and she gasps — the cold May water shocks her, but she’s refreshed. As another set of waves line up she turns around and pulls herself back toward the shore. She high-steps quickly until she breaks away. As she stamps up the steep sand a warm hand grazes the small of her back. She jumps slightly, shocked by the unexpected human contact. A man with messy dirty-blonde hair is behind her. “Sorry,” he says with some embarrassment. “You have a lady bug,” he holds out a red and black-spotted bug on the tip of his finger. She stares at it.
“Oh.” After a pause. “It’s good luck, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know”, he says.
“Neither do I,” she laughs.
“I didn’t want you to miss it,” he finishes.
He pushes his extended finger closer. The bug flits its wings and darts into the wind.
“Well, thank you,” she says. “Now we’ll both have some good luck.”
She smiles and turns, not wanting to indulge in too long of a conversation with a stranger. He turns back to the group that was gathered around him, the arms of his wetsuit hanging around his waist. Four men lay on surf boards behind him. He resumes his lesson, demonstrating the proper stance.
With their eyes focused on new tasks — her on her belongings and him on his surfboard — they both thought of each other. She returns to her towel and collapses onto her stomach. Her book lays where she’d left it. She turns to the bookmarked page and begins reading. Behind her she feels the presence of the man with the long hair. She feels his thoughts on her. She stares into the words of her book and listens carefully. She can hear him explaining how to paddle. After a few minutes, she flips over and watches as he leads the other men through a sequence. First standing, then jumping down onto the board and then back up. After a few minutes, they tie their leashes to their ankles and begin the walk to the water. The man with the long hair grasps for the zipper on his wetsuit, pulling it up over his back and shoulders. Zipped up the suit displays the curving outline of his sinuous body. It’s the body of a man who spends most of his time moving, who avoids the indoors, and who rarely has shoes on his feet. His life was different than hers and that is perhaps why she likes him. As a woman who lives in time frames, time seems to matter less to him. She thought of the lady bug flying off his finger and wondered how he could have noticed it. Like a lightning bolt they were connected. Their eyes on the spotted bug and then on each other. But as she watches him float over the waves, moving with the gyrations of the ocean, she knows his thoughts were with the water. The sun was lower in the afternoon sky and she can feel him sighing with relief as the cool Pacific runs through his wetsuit, filling up the looser crevices, cool at first, but warming from his body. It’s his home. She thinks that they would immediately love each other. But he would always love the ocean more. Just as they connected, they separated.
She drifts back into her body, which lies on the warm sand. A fresh ocean breeze blows past her and she sighs. The breeze carries her sigh off and away. She is left with the joy that sitting in the sun can bring and the calm of methodic crashing waves. The coastline seems to breath deeply, in the midst of a deep nap, dreaming of an amber sunset. She thinks one more time of the man with long hair and she wishes him well.
