This is the first in a four-part series inspired from music and the memory of a place it brings up. I’d envisioned this story as being read with this soundtrack playing gently in the background, and I hope you get a chance to experience it that way, too. The lyrics and their meaning don’t matter.
A twirl of air on the dunes, these miniature sandstorms a playful version of their larger, more ferocious counterparts. The smell of sea breeze deeply entrenched into the skin.
Perhaps after all these years if you scratched the surface, you’d still find sand under my skin, each grain a vivid memory picked up somewhere along the seashore.
The relentless crash of the waves- one memory melting into the next. The days are a blur and that time is but one long, endless twilight hour.
The time we looked at peanuts, and wished they were diamonds; and the time when diamonds meant nothing.
One footprint behind another, one in front, soon entangled like the bodies they belonged to.
“You’re mine,” he said, and just for a moment, they meant it.
There was no eternity to be had here. After all, how do you define eternity when every story’s end comes pre-written?
I’ve always wondered what life would be like with an accompanying soundtrack.
I realise now that my life always did.
Humming a tune so loudly that people come by and stare. “You can sing?” “And you can dance!” We’re the perfect pair, if only for today.
That was the nature of my summer romance. Fleeting. Complete. Endless. Enough.
Now fading gently from memory like a sepia-toned picture. The outlines are all drawn in, but the details are bleeding out from the edges.
My heart space has its boundaries set, and newer experiences are crowding it out. All that remains now is a distant memory, and the knowledge that this was once my life.
I loved, and lost, and was lost to someone too.
That eventually, we turned away from each other, one final time. That we know now what we didn’t accept then.
We’re all just straight lines, intersecting but once in our lifetime.
