Drifting Home
On a Summer Night
It was the summer of two years ago when my friends and I drove out to a park by the water. We left around eleven. After driving through dark roads and navigating many turns and curves, we got to the park around midnight. We walked onto the beach. Moonlight painted the world blue. A nostalgic shade of blue, as if each grain of sand reflecting the light were a memory. A shore of memories. My friends and I found a log to sit on and for a few minutes, just sat there in silence.
The moon was a single lightbulb in a small room. We looked up at the sky, amazed at how brightly it shone and how small we felt beneath it. There is something beautiful about soaking in silence. Allowing it to sit beside you, giving space for it to be present. Right then and there a space cleared in my heart. A space for that scene—my friends and I sitting beneath the glow of a moon shining like the sun.
For a moment time forgot its movement. The world stood still. I breathed in fresh air and exhaled the stars into being. My friends and I were cosmic travellers, treading on dreams. Waves lapped against the shore, moonlight reflected off the water, and our eyes basked in the beauty of an impossibility.
“Do you guys think something happened when we were kids?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something impossible. A world we discovered on our own. A place we may have visited.”
“Hm,” I said. “Maybe we did.”
“Before we grew up,” he said. “And just forgot.”
The thought had never occurred to me until that night. Sitting beneath the moon and by the sea, a feeling of wonder swelled up inside of me. The same feeling you get when something is too good to be true but turns out okay in the end. Gratitude for everything which happened and still remember, but also for everything else which happened and was forgotten. I knew then that we are all composed of memories. And without them we are lost.
I am drifting on top of an ocean. Childhood is a lighthouse on the shore behind me. It grows smaller and smaller, shrinking in the distance. Every drop of water beneath is a memory. Memories either made or waiting to be made. I dip my hand into it, feeling for the temperature, sensing the depths. I close my eyes. Day becomes night. I open my eyes and take one last look. A light continues to blink.
I look ahead and see something on the horizon. A beach painted in moonlight. The moon hangs in the sky like a firefly in a meadow. On the shore I see people sitting on a log. Their faces are frozen in awe and wonder. Like the moon and the stars they are still. I dip my hand into the ocean and remember. I drift slowly to the sand and the silent shadows.
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