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If you don’t have woods, have water. Have ocean. Have wave.
If you don’t have dapple, have starlight.
Have end-of-summer air that blows into your cheeks and arms, your breastbone and knees. Force that air in and further in by riding your old beater bike through the almost empty streets of that sandy fist of a town.
Ride past the teenagers glowing with deviance outside the old Town Hall.
Ride past the leather-clad couple making out on the steps of Spiritus.
Ride past the Portuguese bakery, just starting to wake up at that early morning hour.
Ride past the people tucked inside their gray-shingled homes. The ones who fought all night are sleeping now as are the ones who danced and drank and fucked all night. Your best friend who invited you here then forgot you is mumbling dream nonsense into his new boyfriend’s ear. The new friends you never made are tossing in their lumpy beds. The women you never kissed are drooling into their pillows.
When it is no longer night, when it is 4:30am, in the almost-dawn, roll down the mild west-end hill toward the breakwater, and become the fastest thing around. Let all the unrisked moments of summer, of school, of your own unfound body, scatter into the warm air. Let the shyness loosen in the wind and billow off your back, lost in a hedge of tea roses.
Remember this: You are only five percent fixed. The rest is hum and maybe and why not.
So become the most beautiful and graceful thing for miles.
Except for the ocean and the sand that meets it.
Except for the sky and the land’s end stars that prick it.
Concede to the salty water since you are mostly water. Concede to the sand since it has worked so much longer than you to become itself. Concede to the sky because the sky fills your lungs with every breath.
And the stars?
Stand on the massive stones dividing the shifting dunes from the harbor, look up and pick one. Know that its beam has worked its way toward your eyes for more time than you can hold. The light of another star, one you didn’t pick, made the same long trek. In the last few feet of its journey, its light is washed out by a streetlamp that nobody needs. Lost to you, but not lost.
Who could deny such patient beauty its prize?
Here. Take it.
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T.A Burkholder’s writing has appeared in Vinyl, Nailed, The Feminist Wire and other journals. Her piece in The Cincinnati Review received a Notable Essay listing in The Best American Essays 2013. She can be found online at https://notuntilnow.blog/