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Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be strung up in front of the drag club downtown for so much as thinking this, but I kind of hate June.
I don’t want to hate it. I’d really like if I liked it. It’s not even that I don’t have good memories about it. Some of my favorite memories came about during that month. The first time I ever went down a water slide. The first time my husband ever called me his boyfriend. The last time he ever called me his boyfriend…
My professors always remarked that I had an incredible memory for detail, a steel trap that clamps down and never lets go. I wish I didn’t. I would give anything in the world and more to remember just a little bit less about a lot of things, and this?
This is one.
We were down at the beach at Herne Bay. We had gone out there at least once every summer since we’d met, and this one was no different.
At least, I’d had no reason to think it was.
Nick insisted on setting up our picnic without me, which should have been a tip off, but I was so winded from the walk out from the car park that I registered nothing and welcomed the break. He planted down my umbrella and my chair and retreated behind me to set up his masterpiece.
He told me not to look until he was done.
In front of me, there was this little boy, towhead blond with a cowlick in the front that the sea breeze had taken to playing with. He was about the same age as Nick’s students, something like seven if I had to guess. Nick could tell you exactly; he has a gift for that sort of thing. I don’t.
I sat back catching my breath and watching the kid, living in the false reality where this was going to be a normal day, a day I might forget someday.
The boy was hunting along the shore for large stones and haphazardly piling them up off to the side, just out of reach of the surf. His feet pinged off the hot pebbles in a way that reminded me of Hermes, flouncing through the world on winged sandals.
He skipped by, diving in for a smooth speckled volcanic beauty just beyond the toe of my sandal. He didn’t say a word, but he chucked out one of those sunny acknowledging smiles that only children and Nick seem to know how to give. I did my best to return the gesture, and he seemed pleased enough to resume his self imposed task.
I studied which of the beach’s plethora of rocks he kept and rejected with hazy interest, noticing quickly that he had no apparent preference for their color, as I had always done. His pile drew from every color on offer without any balance to their distribution, a fact which pecked at my brain as a crow pecks at seeds scattered across the ground.
I began to ponder what parameters he was considering when he took one into his fists, turning it over and around and digging into its surface with his eyes. He was looking for some quality I could not yet identity, something I was missing.
Whatever it was, the child’s confidence was unmistakable. He knew exactly what it was that he wanted, and he would accept no less than exactly his prize. He would stay out here all day if that was what it took to seize perfection.
I started naming him in my head, skipping names off the surface of my mind that I might want to give to a little boy someday and determining if they made enough of a splash.
At some point, I looked down the beach, chasing down an errant thought that this child might not be supervised. Relief washed over me like seafoam when that was not the case.
There were plenty of people out by the water that afternoon. It was a balmy Saturday in the summer, and anyone in their right mind would be remiss to forsake such a prime opportunity for a beach day.
You would think that it would be hard to pick out one child’s mother from a sea of them, but it wasn’t.
You could see it in the way she was watching him, like he was the only living being on earth, like the sun only shone down from the heavens to keep this little boy warm, like he was everything, and she’d fight with her life to keep it that way. I watched her until I saw the dawn of pleased realization paint over her sunburn, leading me to follow her sparkling gaze back out.
The boy had the first three rocks arranged one on top of the other by the time my focus came back to him, and he was in the process of adjusting the fourth. The pile had not been his creation, just the supply bin from which to build his masterpiece. He had to ensure he was working with clean, level building materials if he were going to try and scrape the sky.
He worked with surgical precision, worrying at his lip with his teeth a little more with each movement, inhaling sharply with every passing gust of wind that shuddered the ruffle of my umbrella.
The sun was finally melting down the middle of the sky, offering a much needed reprieve from the torment it had wrought all day long. Neither Nick’s skin nor my respiratory system could ever stand too much of it, so coming outside for only the last few drops of its shine had become second nature. I came to enjoy this time the most, when the waters turn to cool molten lava. The bluest parts of the sea take a break from their sadness to cast their waning hope up to the sky in bands of orange light, interrupted by cracks of indigo where the waves skim along ever darkening surface. Soon, it will be nothing but wine darkness, but not yet.
When he was just about finished, his tower having come up high enough to tickle his navel, he cast two quick glances out for approval.
One to his mother, and one, it seemed, to me.
I smiled.
I watched as the mother, having sprung from her seat, grabbed the boy by the arm, tugging him away. Something in his eyes broke, waves crashing against cliffs of confusion.
He struggled, trying to break out of her grip, clawing for just one more moment, one more minute to achieve what he had to painstakingly set out to do and bask in it, but his mother held firm. She had the rest of their belongings slung under her other arm, ready to go this instant.
I couldn’t hear his pleas, but I could feel them, drumbeats in the wind echoing endlessly.
He looked at me one more time and pointed at something behind my head, a picture of innocence cracking under the weight of what he couldn’t understand, and whatever he said next dug French manicured fingernail divots into his skin.
He was whisked away, taking flight on the tips of his sandals, along the water and out of sight.
I found that odd. The car park would have been the other direction, up the rocks past the dune whence we’d come.
We.
I turned back towards Nick, intending only to check that he was doing alright and hadn’t fainted from the summer heat or anything. I found what the little boy had been pointing towards, what had scared his mother badly enough to drag him away kicking and screaming to anywhere but here.
“Hi.” My husband poked his head up from where he had been knelt down trying to light or relight a pillar candle, one of at least a dozen he had out there doing their best while sputtering against the breeze.
Our picnic, which I had picked out and approved from the safe foods list in the kitchen before we left, was out on a blanket as promised, but it wasn’t our usual blue and yellow gingham one. This one was as white as a blanket of snow laid down impossibly in the height of summer. Behind the blanket were two circular velvet cushions in the same dark navy color as the sky was becoming above us, accompanied by a vase of complementary flowers, obviously silk ones, which might come off as a cheap touch if they weren’t so clearly meant for me, the person with the worst flower allergy in the known universe. Developing horrific congestion on the car ride over might have spoilt the surprise just a tad. He’d clearly considered that carefully and planned around it to give me everything just the way I needed it.
The air seemed to go still as I watched the man of my dreams drop to a knee and waited for my emotions to cooperate with me.
This is the best moment of my life.
Everything is perfect.
I’m in love.
My boyfriend doesn’t want to be boyfriends anymore.
He wants to be my husband.
He wants me to be his husband.
Overhead, a shower of meteors streaked through the sky, something like a good luck charm, but I felt as though they’d slammed into me and blown my whole world to bits. I dropped to my knees in front of him and buried my head in his neck as my face went damp, and it took me longer than it should have to realize that it was raining. The beach cleared, as everyone around us having normal days in their normal lives abandoned the sea the moment the splashes hitting their skin weren’t salty enough.
People accept one source of water but not another, even when they come out just as wet either way.
Nick got the umbrella and made the best of it. I’m not naive enough to think that he couldn’t tell that I wasn’t all the way with him, all the way okay, but he was as solid and steady as he’s always been with my tempestuous moods. He pushed our little seat cushions together and held me through the storm until it passed, packing up our little meal to eat on the way home, and it wasn’t hard to tell that he was still happy. He would have been happy even if lightning had struck him.
Happy comes to him as easily as yawning when he’s tired, following naturally from the occasion as it ought to do.
Happiness doesn’t come to me when I ask, or when I think it should. I can be as tired as death without grasping even a wink of sleep, and I can be so deep into love that I can’t see anything but the glow of Nick’s face in the candlelight without feeling so much as a flicker of tangerine joy in my inky blue heart.
Sometimes, all I can think about is a little boy, a tower of rocks, and how long it will take for this month to be over.