I washed ashore, weak and waterlogged and with my tail between my legs.
Look at me and tell me that you'll remember me.
These were the words with which the foamy waters of the Mexican Gulf greeted me that blue summer. I revise these memories with the choppy sobriety of a day drinker, yet hardly a drop had touched my lips that summer. Instead, I sought an endless supply of Vitamin C, hoping to prolong a longevity I had expected to lose. My feet kissed the sand, the sun glimmers on my skin, but a vicious sadness silenced my heart.
I had returned home that blue summer. This ironic return had capstone the first of many broken promises. I would make many promises in the coming weeks, some as ceremonious as a Waffle House pact, but breaking a promise opens an acute wound every time. The shards of these promises befall my soul like grains of sand, staying with me for hours even after I think I'm clean. So shame followed me home. Like that first taste of beer, however, more bitterness would follow. I'd close my eyes and meet a new friend, that whispering voice of future cancers. A black Lab, staring back at me, his or her eyes as trusting as a newborn's.
The ocean beckons. And like its crystalline waters, the shades of blue that summer were ever-changing, always jumping between hues. The sad nihilism that crescendoed with every crashing wave engendered an infinite feedback loop of discrete memories all linked in color. The season blurred together like the gnashing teeth of a gradient.
I had my distractions. The exam. My job. But the repetition of these tasks brought me back to the ocean, whose waves crashed in perpetuity. I lost my mind gazing into the infinite. When fate had returned me to the beach, I should have interpreted the nighttime coastal ambience with the same divinity as I do now.
Actually, I think I lost my mind in quarantine. Estranged from society, my loved ones, in that room every day. That external remind of my mistakes, my failures, and my broken promises with all their shades of gray. In the bleakness of my lonesome, I escaped to those coastal waters once again, lured from one futility to another. I derived meaning from the incomprehensible, and I sought a hypothesis from its contrary. Those orange sands murmured an ancient song, yet I could not respond.
I lost a part of myself that summer. And still I return to the call of the ocean on occasion, searching for a sense of self beneath the waves. It calls to me, but I cannot find my voice.
Part of a series on the summers that stick with us. Be sure to check out "Orange Summer".