I don’t realize the need for rest until the

Chevy cavalier with the wrong color bumper

grows wings and learns to fly. Twelve hours

of a Friday suddenly turn into Let’s go

to the beach. I self-examine as if I’m

crazy, suggesting the most scandalous thing,

to break tradition, break expectation, break

a Friday afternoon open and shake it hard

enough that a little bit of gas money falls out.

Halfway along the freeway, blankets

in the back, textbooks under notepads: I don’t

want to answer my phone today, and I bury it

in the bottom pocket under my sunglasses. Today

I am human, for twelve hours, I am human. And it

shakes me, it has become a rebellion to claim

twelve hours back from busyness. It has become an

act of war to take time to be, just be, to be still. I live,

I work, I breathe, I exist, but I do not allow myself the

time to be truly alive, to see a different part of the sky,

watch the mountains rise up and fall down into the sea,

to experience the power of millennia of tides pulling

at my feet. If I can do homework anywhere, why would

I be home? Why is it that Morro Bay feels like a revolution,

a political science book covered in sand becomes a statement,

that I am no longer owned by an object I paid shipping

and handling for. I stand in the water, washed by a September

afternoon. Here, I am alive, here I have found rest, and here

I realize that balance trumps success because all of the hours

I spend in the depths of routine expectation cannot give me

the moment of ocean water on my ankles, the way skin prickles,

alive, that moment belongs to me and me alone. Sand makes

molds of my feet, scattering them around as a reminder: She’s

been here. We don’t take photographs to tell others we went

out, they’re to remind ourselves what we felt when we lived,

the big smile, the messed up beach blown sense of self that

shows through when the polish rubs off, and I scream the

songs on the radio long after the static takes over in

mountain passes, 41 to the 46 to the 101 to the 1.

I chant it to myself, a promise that my tires know

the way, that I remember where I need to be to breathe,

and that today is as good a day as any to start.