THE BEACH IS FOR OTHER PEOPLE

Memory, sand, and the space where the water meets the sky. Plus: my essay in The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad.

Hi friends, I hope this finds you as well as can be. There are so many new readers here, welcome to Resilience! A big thank you is due to

The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad

for sharing my essay “Leave Your Name at the Door.” I am deeply touched by the comments and notes. Thank you for sharing your heart.

I missed last week because (as you’ll read below) we dropped everything to go to the beach. And now this week’s essay has no audio because, ready for this? I’m halfway through my first silent meditation retreat and I can’t find anywhere to record it! I hope you’ll get a kick out of this naughty Buddhist trying to figure it all out.

Thank you for being here! May this week’s offering be of benefit. xx

Me and Lou at the beach last week.

When I was a little girl, my grandparents owned a condo in Longboat Key, Florida. The earliest memories I have are feeding seagulls with my grandfather, watching my grandmother lather coconut sunscreen all over her long, glamorous legs, and falling asleep in the sand, only to be carried, as though by magic, up to bed. I spent a lot of time sitting with my pail and bucket, wondering about the space where the water met the sky.

Where did it lead to?

I loved the ocean, even though I was a little scared of it. My dreams were full of deep dives I would never take, treasures I could only imagine. But all this came to an abrupt halt when my grandfather died, and my grandmother sold the condo. On one of the last trips to Florida, a rip tide took me in and spit me back out.

I never went in all the way again.

Years went by, and we didn’t get to the beach. I came of age in downtown New York. My filmmaker parents worked summers, and the only beach I had was the then-decrepit piers along the West Side Highway, where bad things happened. Marsha Johnson, the famous trans activist, was murdered there, her body found along the docks. My sister and I called her the Beautiful Flower Lady. I dreamed of her for many years. Sometimes I swore I still saw her turning the corner at Christopher Street, the colorful condom wrappers and leftover confetti from Pride strewn about the streets like rocks and shell bits in the sand...

By then, I decided that the beach, the actual beach, was for other people. Rich people. People with bodies unlike mine. At sixteen, I was already soft and curvy, my skin white and translucent, my veins puffy and blue like my grandmother's. My first boyfriend, Ryan, said he could follow the veins all the way to my heart. He grew up on Long Island, and it was with him that I briefly rediscovered the beach: seagulls flying overhead, the smell of coconut sunscreen, falling asleep in the sand.

That summer, I tried my luck and waded in past my hips, only to be taken under again. I woke up on the sand in a pile of bloody seaweed and sticks and algae, the colors a whirl like my grandmother’s watercolors, or the Beautiful Flower Lady’s crushed bodega petals.

I broke up with Ryan. The beach was indeed for other people.

I worry that I’ve carried my beach issues into adulthood, into motherhood. My ten-year-old sons, West and Lou, have been insisting that they’d never been to the beach. “You have!” I kept reminding them, though I knew it had been a long time. “Three years?” my husband, Ian, wondered. “Yikes, I think five?” “We’ve never been to the beach!” the boys repeated. “Your kids haven’t been to the beach in five years?” friends asked, astonished.

How to explain that the last five plus years have felt like one rip tide after another?

The beach is for other people. At least, it was until last week.

West in the sand.

I dropped everything when our friends invited us out East. I ran to CVS, to Walmart, trying to remember what Beach People bring to the beach. Pails and buckets? Bath towels, no, special beach towels. I bought coconut sunscreen.

“Beach!” my kids kept yelling, reminding me of Ryan Gosling’s Ken in Barbie. “Beach,” I echoed under my breath, as though it were a foreign word, or a new concept. How had the beach become such an abstraction, something for other people, something so out of reach?

Four hours and a ferry ride later, my kids were jumping waves with their friends and filling the CVS buckets with rocks, shell bits, and seaweed. I lay there watching the seagulls. There was a rip tide warning, but eventually I got up off my Walmart towel and headed into the water, too.

I wish I could tell you that I went all the way in, that I fearlessly dove into the waves. But I went slowly, the water foaming around my ankles, then my thighs, my waist. As I waded, with my children’s cries of delight around me, I missed my grandparents. What I’d have given these past years to have fallen asleep in the sand, only to be carried, as though by magic, upstairs to bed. I thought of the Beautiful Flower Lady and how, as a kid, her murder was the worst thing I’d ever heard. How I’d go on to experience some pretty terrible things. How the beach, how joy, became something for other people.

Seagulls flew circles above my head. I watched them until they disappeared into the space where the water meets the sky.

A marvelous wave started towards me, and I jumped it — just in time.

A MEDITATION:

May I be brave enough to return to the things that bring me joy. No matter my stories, no matter how long it’s been. May I be brave.

Feel free to leave a shard of memory in the comments, a beach tale, or a time you finally returned to something or someplace you love.

Sending my best to all, especially at this moment in our world. Here’s to the space between the water and the sky.

Back into the silence I go…

xx Alexa