Three Hours Before Seventeen
4 September 2005
9.19 pm
Three hours… and counting.
Corregidor was beautiful. The mountains were green and the air smelled of the sea; my shoes made tracks in the sand as Sarah and I, under blue and pink umbrellas, made our way to the shore. The waves crashed and receded, crashed and receded, and I thought that it was something like a song, and didn’t the water and the wind ever get tired of singing?
It felt like the edge of the world; it felt like you could be swept along the tide and never return. In the distance I could see the foggy shadows of distant islands, and yet it felt as though we were isolated from everything else, as though we were the only people in the world. There was laughter and the boys swam in the sea, the less daring ones only rolling up their trouser legs to feel the water gush against their feet and skin. Before the noise of other people could disturb my communion with the sea I knelt and picked up pebbles on the beach and wrote in the sand. The waves came up to erase every letter.
It was imperfect and beautiful and everyone was laughing and making the most of it, taking photographs and chasing one another down the shore, being soaked through… but I couldn’t share in their laughter. I could only think that I wish I were there with someone I loved. I wish I didn’t have to see it alone, because alone is what you are when you are with people who don’t love you. I wish I didn’t have to spend my birthday alone.
And though I knew she wouldn’t truly have appreciated the view or the breathtaking history of the place, though I knew she would have found a way to make the day less than perfect, I wish I could have stood with her there at the edge of the world, our own Dover Beach, where earth met sky and where the waves never stop roaring.
9.35pm
9.19 pm
Three hours… and counting.
Corregidor was beautiful. The mountains were green and the air smelled of the sea; my shoes made tracks in the sand as Sarah and I, under blue and pink umbrellas, made our way to the shore. The waves crashed and receded, crashed and receded, and I thought that it was something like a song, and didn’t the water and the wind ever get tired of singing?
It felt like the edge of the world; it felt like you could be swept along the tide and never return. In the distance I could see the foggy shadows of distant islands, and yet it felt as though we were isolated from everything else, as though we were the only people in the world. There was laughter and the boys swam in the sea, the less daring ones only rolling up their trouser legs to feel the water gush against their feet and skin. Before the noise of other people could disturb my communion with the sea I knelt and picked up pebbles on the beach and wrote in the sand. The waves came up to erase every letter.
It was imperfect and beautiful and everyone was laughing and making the most of it, taking photographs and chasing one another down the shore, being soaked through… but I couldn’t share in their laughter. I could only think that I wish I were there with someone I loved. I wish I didn’t have to see it alone, because alone is what you are when you are with people who don’t love you. I wish I didn’t have to spend my birthday alone.
And though I knew she wouldn’t truly have appreciated the view or the breathtaking history of the place, though I knew she would have found a way to make the day less than perfect, I wish I could have stood with her there at the edge of the world, our own Dover Beach, where earth met sky and where the waves never stop roaring.
9.35pm