In Memory

While walking on the cement path down to the beach, I imagined that the clicking of my flip flops must sound similar to the ticking of time’s hands. I lagged behind my friends while they blasted house music across the manicured park lawn, painted black by the early dawn’s lack of light. I picked at a scab on my ear, keeping a nervous watch of the peculiar arrangement of strangers passing by. A pudgy man in all black, a few steps ahead. A woman in a baggy sleeveless top, walking her dog. A biker trailing smoothly beside us, grazing the bushes. I was too tired and hungover to imagine their stories then, but I had pocketed their appearances in my memory to conjure their narratives for when I remembered, which happens to be now.

I imagine that the man must be in his late forties, and walked with a gait that betrayed a slight limp. He had a cap on, hands tucked into his pants while striding ahead, eventually diverging from our path to walk down a pier adjacent to the beach. I decided then that he must be plagued by a sadness, because no reasonably happy person walks down a pier at six in the morning for reasons other than reminiscing or attempting suicide.

I imagine that the woman walking her dog must be composed, presumably a lawyer or a doctor or some other profession that requires the discipline needed to wake oneself at such an hour to walk a dog. A taut smile pulled at her face; the long hours must be stretching her thin. I wonder if she has a partner or child, although the confidence in her stride alludes that the dog must be acting as a substitute for one or the other.

I imagine the biker must be full of life, or at least feel as such. He was a young twenty-something year old man, blazing through the darkness with a tenacity that only someone with aspirations yet squashed by the weight of life must hold. I picture him to be like all the other Miami men, pursuing finance or marketing or a combination of the two, badgering around until he ends up on a yacht with people larger than he ever will be.

I wonder if they picture me too. A girl who’s body lands in the awkward space between thin and portly, a distance behind her friends that can only signify indifference or fatigue. The woman would surely wonder where my mother is, and the man might wonder where my father is. I’m sure that the young biker would see me as nothing but an footnote on his path to success.

My friends and I make it to the beach, and I watch the rest of my graduating class trickle in after us. The sun was dripping orange and purple onto the horizon, and I think that by now the man must’ve made it down to the end of the pier, that the woman must be back in her apartment having finished her walk, that the biker must be gliding down Lincoln road. I scan the beach, joy wreathing in the parabolas of smiles on endless faces. People are screaming and laughing and a fifth Bad Bunny song is playing far too loudly on a speaker half the size of my body. My friends are taking pictures that I maneuver out of unless absolutely forced to, and I step into the water. “It’s so nice and warm,” one of my friends says, and I nod wordlessly in agreement. The tepid foam washes over my feet while I stare into the bleeding sun, and I begin to realize why some people walk into the ocean and never really come back out.

As the day progresses, I dedicate my focus on appearing as content as possible. My friends make bad jokes and I laugh with them, they have conversations about deteriorating romantic pursuits and I contribute, they splash around and I try my best not to feel irritated by the saltwater stinging my eyes. At one point they are all talking, and I decide to start floating. I tip my body horizontally, letting the ocean’s surging waves keep me afloat while I rest atop its belly. I spread out my arms and legs, and I close my eyes, feeling the water cusp around my head. For a moment I feel as though I am nothing but a face. I soak in the loss of my senses while thinking to myself the same thought I had when I first discovered this activity on a beach in the Bahamas at thirteen: this is the closest I will get to never having a body. I clutched onto this modicum of happiness until a friend approached me, which I had sensed through a series of ripples in the water.

“What are you doing?” She asks in a garbled voice; my ears were filled with the quiet thrumming of water. I open my eyes, and I watch her head hover over mine, a serene smile illuminating her face. “Floating. It’s very peaceful,” I say. She smiles a little wider, the apples of her cheeks flushed red with warmth. “You look very happy,” she says, and the modicum swells into something larger. She places her hands on the small of my bank and looks ahead. “They should turn this into a kind of therapy,” I say, and she laughs. “I think that already exists,” she says, looking back down at me. It was my turn to smile, and I feel the muscles of my face spread into a grin. “Float with me,” I say, and she lets go of me, before tilting her body to match mine. We drift parallel to each other for what might’ve been seconds or decades. I hear my name called out from beneath the water, and we both shoot upright. We had drifted a fair distance away from our group of friends, and they were laughing at the fact that I had managed to hear them while submerged. We swim back, and the modicum is washed away. I let it sink into the sea.

There are moments like these that I will always want to remember. Moments that act like a glimmering star on a Christmas tree of regret and shame. Up until very recently, I had always thought of forgetting as a passive act. One that simply occurs when the sands of time buff away at memories, leaving them nothing but a grainy blur of nostalgia. I had begun my journey in writing as a defense mechanism against this erosion, hoping that if I captured the beautiful moments, I could hold them up as evidence that I had any at all. A life tormented by unending ambivalence, and this was the cure.

I think now that writing is an act of forgetting. When I write about the beautiful moments, I know they will never read as beautiful as they felt. And when I write about the ugly moments, I am reminded that I will never again feel the details lost to dunes. Even now, as I write about the beach and it’s inhabitants, I wonder about the minutiae sloughed away, caught by the filter of perspective. I do not remember the man’s face, I do not remember the kind of dog the woman walked, I do not remember the biker’s clothing.

In my early writing, I used to struggle with toning down what I chose to include. Colors and shapes and feelings, I wanted to grab it all and splay it out in a perfect photograph of what once was. I know now that writing is painting with memories. And there is a beauty in losing detail in the brushstrokes.

I remember that there was a flower tucked into the corner of my friend’s ear. The petals were the same red as the crimson blush on her cheeks, and they bent outward towards the waxing light. The style poked out from the petals, peppered with stamens that branched like small arms, reaching for something to grab. I’d ask you if you knew what kind of flower it was, but I remember that wasn’t your kind of thing.

Dedicated to sunrises just beautiful enough to forget