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.
