The strange giddy essence of summer has been long spent. I’m back to my beach now, back to reality.
How hateful it was to see Anne once more. It was as if, in exile from her, on the sunny south coast, she floated in a bubble of perfection, colouring every image that invaded my head. Then, once my eyes were confronted with the truth of her image, they were suitably repulsed. How her features hang from her face, how her bones seem to sag. I kissed her goodbye on her pallid cheek and headed for the beach.
This is a beach, this is a real beach. No streams and golden sand, no bikinis and balls, no surfers and no tanning crowds – just a miraculous red-brown slop, as far as the eye can see.
Who knows where the sand stops and the tide begins? None would dare walk out on it for fear of being sucked down beneath the cloying mud.
That’s what I’ve come to appreciate now. I don’t need the beauty of the blue sky and the miles of pristine beach. Give me a dangerous, windswept, miraculous, mudpool any day. Give me something that will swallow me up in its bleak glutinous tide any day of the week.
Give me Sylvie.
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3 comments:
This made me laugh out loud. I guess it's the way he seemed so undecided on these women and now, repulsed by his affair with his ex, rather than deciding for your usual sort of 'positive' reasons, he chooses based on who's the most bleak and dangerous.
Well done on your end, it's realistic and a satisfying development for this little arc of postcards. Though I doubt this fellow's done...
Oooo, yes I know the "Real Beach" too. The out-of-season holiday town one in the rain(to paraphrase Chris DeBurg.) Well, maybe not the rain. But something gray. And rocky in patches. (mud, not so much for me - like my shoes clean.) But a place where the sky presses you down to a grain of sand yourself.
Bravo! I get this one.
I get this one too! Even though it's kind of depressing, I love it. It makes me think of being on holiday a few years ago in a caravan on a beach full of stones and mud and rain. Even though that was kind of depressing, I loved that too. :-)
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