Fish and Chips
How maddeningly luxurious, what ridiculous bliss.
I spent yesterday at a rocky beach on a patch of sand. Now I’m sunburnt and feeling lazy, and my plans for the day were pushed to another. I'm wearing lime blue sweatshorts and a rusty t-shirt splotched with bleach stains. I woke up at noon and my hair feels full and soft and blonde. An ingrown hair at the top of my thigh is no longer inflamed — I credit it all to the ocean.
The day promised a high of 95 degrees, heavy with humidity, assured to be miserable in the city of Boston. So, both with the day off, F and I traveled 70 miles south to a beach that borders Rhode Island. On the way down, we listened to Top 40 and ordered food we didn't end up picking up: a salami sub and a greek salad, neither of us particularly hungry nor serious, and the place too inconvenient of a detour. I had hardly slept the night before, though my exhaustion was not irritable — rather, goofy and giggly, like at the tail end of a late night, when fatigue erodes that unconscious filter and you simply spew sounds that may sound like words, sighs, or snorts, depending. My conversation was most certainly bad, although I did manage to note how a person just in our line of sight looked strikingly like the love child of Napoleon Dynamite and Freddy Mercury: mustache, perm, and all.
We landed on a little sandy dimple of the beach, where F splayed his blanket. Little rocks that hurt my feet surrounded the spot. Behind us were grassy dunes, and in front the rocks ascended slightly and then descended sharply into the ocean, which we couldn't see, only hear not far away. The blanket is army green and rough to the touch. F’s mom expertly ordained it his "WWII blanket" because of these qualities, plus it contains a few marked idiosyncrasies, importantly the unmistakable aura of a veteran. F got it for five bucks at an antique store; we have concluded it served.
My fatigue added to the trip's dreaminess. When I laid down, my body felt heavy, like I could never get up again. My weight felt earned, just like a meal tastes better when you haven't eaten all day, and the start of spring feels sweeter after a particularly miserable winter. I hardly had the energy to think any thoughts at all — let alone divulge them — being simply a contented mound of pinky flesh, only able to haphazardly reapply sunscreen, listen to waves crash onshore, and remove rocks from underneath its stomach so that it can be even more comfortable. How maddeningly luxurious, what ridiculous bliss. I thought of my mom and dad and grandparents and how they should be feeling this instead of me, so much more heavy than me with responsibility, with all the more potential for relief. Really we all should.
My memories of the day are full, though the edges feel a bit blurred and full of whimsy. I remember how the salt water knocked the air out of my lungs, and then settled them afterward, how good it felt against my skin and in my hair; how the water glided over my body's bumps and bruises — the thorns humans snag and consider — healing some and tenderly leaving others; how a wave devilishly tempted me to take a breath underneath it, something so childish though so earnest. Human beauty and energy feels so futile next to the ocean’s.
F asked whether I’d rather walk on water or be able to breathe under it. I said breathe. Walking on water feels like a party trick. After all, where would you even go?
