Friday, March 4, 2011

A Beautiful Afternoon

It was spring. Or late summer. We were on found time, as usual. There wasn't anyone else around. I was wearing sandals; I know this because they broke, and this fact is a critical element of the story. It was a beautiful afternoon. I know this, because I remember it fondly. We were in Milford, at a beach recently discovered.

The tide, like all tides, comes and goes, according to its own will or plan, or by the coersion of the moon, but we don't always see with our eyes the world as it happens. We had walked out to a rocky island, a very Connecticut spit of land. To get there was easy, the return more trecherous. This isn't meant to be poetic, simply what occured. A jetty connected one shore and the other, more tenuous sand. Once around we went, laughing, I would imagine, as that is what we normally do. And when we came back to the point of departure, we realized we would have to move fast. It was getting late, and worse, the water was rising. But my sandal had snapped and Malcolm had to carry me, never an easy burden.

It was sandal season. But a month when you want a sweater come late afternoon. We were young and in love and harmlessly reckless. There was betrayal in our near future, death in the distance, and travel to foreign destinies in the space between. We didn't know any of that then. A liminal afternoon at a beach is now is an axis for other more memorable events, and yet, this moment seems important enough to recall from the depths of my contray memory many years into the present. I'm always wishing it were another place in time.

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