clarity
And it is fun. It’s a cold winter weekend, but still fun. At least the first day is. They all walk along the beach, chatting and laughing. Whizzer and Cordelia skim stones expertly. Marvin and Charlotte try and fail. Cordelia runs too close to the tall waves and gets soaked. She tries to run it off, her hair flying in tendrils behind her, but it doesn’t work. She runs ahead of everyone else, long strides, loving the feel of the wet sand on her feet and the sea breeze on her face, laughing. She looks around. Some of her best memories are on this beach, it’s just five minutes from the house she grew up in. When she was little she’d chase the waves with Whizzer but as they got older it became a place of Even More Importance. She kissed someone for the first time on this beach. She saw Whizzer cry for the first time on this beach. She came to this beach the night her parents split and cried alone until her mom found her. She keeps running as memories flood her conscience. Home and school and friends and family and boyfriends and girlfriends speed through her mind until she accelerates once more and breaks into a sprint, almost as if she’s running away from all these preoccupations. She notices a groove in the sand coming up and decides to vault it. She jumps, falls and lands on her back. It knocks the air out of her.
Suddenly Charlotte is there, fussing over her and asking if she’s alright. She can faintly hear Whizzer doing his concerned Jewish mother of three voice and Marvin awkwardly asking if there’s anything he can do, but somehow she’s blocking them all out. She’s smiling. The noise in her mind has stopped. Somehow the beach and the sand and the waves and the memories and the fall have brought… clarity. She feels herself again. She feels like her body is her own again. She composes herself, sits up, kisses her girlfriend, uses Whizzer’s sweater sleeve to get upright again and smiles at all of them. She’s back.