The beach was empty except for Sabine and I, that mid-September day back in 2004. Our three-week vacation in Washington state was nearing an end and we’d headed to the ocean for a few days. She walked down the beach, picking up shells and driftwood, and I looked back at the path we’d climbed down from the road up high.

The cliff was littered with dead evergreen tree trunks, bleached white by sun and surf. They appeared to be cyclopean bones carelessly swept into a pile against the rocks, the remains of some epic battle long lost. The beach was walled in by the cliff and by the jagged tree bones. There were also a few trunks scattered about the beach, and I sat on one.

I lost track of time.

The sound of the water, and the sound of no one else, maybe, or the cool autumn breeze and bright sun — they were the culprits. Losing track of time is a luxury rarely so well done. Off the shore was a rock formation, and I drew it in my journal. The sun and air and sound of the water made me  feel sleepy and safe and alive; they made all the cycles of life seem not a hopeless circle of repetition and nothing more, but new every morning. The water pounded the rocks into sand and the trees into bones and I did not see death in it.

Bine was gone a long time.

I think about that place now, and how it doesn’t exist. Oh, the beach is still there, but that place was more than just geography. It was also an intersection of time and my path in life. I can’t go back to it again, even though I often want to.

I now think of the sand on that beach, once something monumental, now ground down and easily tossed about; the trees once tall, now rotting in haphazard piles. I know their story best.

The rocks will cry out.
The dry bones will live.
Before I will.