We slept for some hour or so only, before dawn. The night dissolved time. If I were to reconstruct events within the framework of hours, I am sure it would prove a puzzle without solution. I know that just after midnight we left the house and drove up over the cliffs and down to the beach. We walked along the sand. It was cold and there was no moon, only the stars, frigid in space above us; and the ocean, its edges swarming over our feet as we passed between unseen rocks. The cliffs behind offered up only vacant blackness – a beautiful, terrifying blackness that draws your attention and arrests it, erasing all other thoughts but a recognition of infinity.
I took off my shoes and followed the direction she’d passed into the shadows. I remember shadows, lots of them, but there could have been none, only the visual impression of stones and rocks against the sand. I found her perched on a rock, facing out to sea. I clambered onto the rock, feeling slightly foolish. There, holding my balance with difficulty, I put my arm around her for the first time. It was cold, and the waves that crashed down and unfolded before us sharpened the sensation. We spoke, but the words that passed between us were then, and are now looking back, unimportant as unfit to express our other perceptions, as anatomy is silent on the import of the brush of a finger across the hip as it curves into the pubis, or how the smell of skin changes with arousal.
It occurs to me now, although without a doubt, then too: we were completely alone. It seems so ordinary a fact, so simple and unexciting. And yet, without that fact, the entirety of the experience would be made pedestrian, perhaps even ironic, a cruel trick concealing that solitude is an unattainable state except through the lens of relativity and so not attainable at all. As we were absorbed into the darkness, like ghosts passing through dimensions, the lights of houses on the sea cliff seemed distant and alien. We watched them, we spoke briefly of them, but they were not really there. We walked arm in arm.
It is a constant failing in recording any experience at a later date that we cannot avoid the dislocation of event and memory, as if without a second thought our memories are assumed to be not the events at all, but the impression left by them, the footprints of experience if not the experience itself. We reach back in search of essentials. Events are merely the necessary skeletal fragments around which memories are wrapped. So we walked back, embracing, and I remember not each step we took or even the tracks made by our feet in the sand. I remember most of all feeling at peace.
