Thursday, December 4, 2014

Wave after wave.


She and I are already in the ocean when the rain starts, so it's of little consequence. Our clothes are up above the high tide line, discarded peels that we'll return to eventually. With the rain chasing the tourists and locals vendors away, there's no one along the beach who would want them and we have nothing of value with us, save each other's touch.

We came to watch the sunset, the last of our week in Costa Rica, but the storm clouds stretch lazily down to the horizon, and we have no hint of where the sun is behind them. Turning back from the gauzed horizon, we see three little girls along the sand, playing a wordless game. Only occasional chirps of their laughter make it to our senses above the sound of Pacific waves crashing between us and them. They stay for a handful of minutes, a few turns of their game, before the sprinkling speeds into downpour and chases them home, as it has already done to those far older. But the lone boy is more determined, more patient. Like us he's merely in swim gear, the cord around his ankle tethering him to a surfboard. He hugs close to the talismanic shore, staring like us into the abyss of the Pacific. I follow the path of his eyes back into the nothingness and the everything of the water, and under its surface I retake my lover's hand. We watch the waves swell in our direction and brace ourselves against the smaller ones, diving beneath for the larger. We sometimes stand, and sometimes kneel on the sandbed, our motions borrowing a fluidity from that which surrounds us. 

A 30'minute drive up the same coast is where we spent our last day, the hours preceding this obscured sunset, snorkeling briefly in the water off Playa Conchal, and galloping along the sand atop sprinting horses. A far longer drive north above this same coast is where both my love and I spent our childhoods, our adolescence, our early years as adults in California. The same Pacific Ocean that served us on weekends, on days we cut class to chase a better tan, unknown to each other completely, but both out there, experiencing the same unending pattern of breakers of our shared ocean. The Pacific of Kerouac. Of Steinbeck and of Didion. Or of a younger me. In not just Newport or Santa Monica but Kaanapali and Port Douglas and Ko Phi Phi. Even those different, foreign coasts still part of the same vast blanket of water to return to again and again and again.

As the rain picks up even more, we sink to the always'changing surface and watch the rain hit the ocean, water pebbling water, with our eyes just above it. A liquid typewriter to chronicle the afternoon forever into our memory. The mood behind our eyes undulates, from wonder, to gratitude, to a lust so pure it feels scandalous. In love with not simply each other, but this moment, and this pocket of coast and ocean. This set of waves. This life.

A brown pelican traces shapes in the air above our heads and dives down chasing spotted prey. I see it bring its empty mouth back above the water and I do the same, looking just beyond the bird to the south and spot the little boy again. He's laying on his board in the coming waves that are too gentle to surf. He stoically faces a line of boats that have anchored near shore for the night, their skeletal lack of sails making a crude ruler of the horizon. And as she and I clutch each other closer before going back to shore, the red sun blinks reluctantly through for the two of us, for the pelican, and for the boy. For those who waited and didn't abandon it because of a little rainfall. He turns back to us and we three share waves and smiles and calls of "luego" and we step out of the water, leaving the ocean to him. 

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