Reflecting (on) a scene from earlier days.

Catherine and Gale on the beach by the Great Lakes, enjoying the end of a day before Timothy and Louise come to gather them for the ride home.

Based on a memory with the architect. Perhaps it was the same with Gale, when he remembered how it was to be by another woman’s side. He loved Catherine dearly, even as the engineer wished for him to be closer to the pianist. Her success with her wishes disappointed even herself.

I am on a beach, and there is the sun setting before me. Beside me is, once again, Catherine. She is there forever. I am always there with her. We have a beautiful life together in the light, and I see how it all came to be that I have a married friend who I can hold closer in my heart than anyone else in my life.

Yet I misled her, and this haunts me. I wonder how I can apologize.

“Don’t apologize.” She turns to me. “Just be a better man. Let God help you.”

“It all seems so simple when you put it like that,” I laugh.

“There is nothing but simplicity.” She kicks at the sand, then overlapped her feet in the hot grains that were cooling with the coming nightfall. “That is the beauty of it. You can stay in paradise forever.”

Watercolor painting of a woman at the beach from afar. Her face is unseen, and strands of her hair fall beautifully around her shoulders. Her white summer dress is billowing in the wind, and her thin pale arm is holding onto the brim of her hat. There is a knowledge of deep loneliness, one that ordinary people cannot know.

Catherine was more beautiful than I ever could have imagined. Could I have known that she would be an eternal memory, forever speaking to me on the beach? I thought of how when we were young, I thought nothing of her any more than I wondered if there was something that showed me to be seeing the scenes in my head that became something much more than I could have ever imagined. I can see with my mind's eye all the things that I wanted to make real, the things that I could not admit were mine til it was much too late.

Catherine was so beautiful, sitting on the sand. She looked out at the waters that met the sky in a tight hug, stretching out as an infinite double firmament. < This too shall pass. >

< You’re a real killjoy, you know. >

< Everything washes away. > Did she even hear me? If so, she was good at pretending otherwise. < What profit has a man from all his labor? >

I ran a finger through the fine grains that cooled with the coming of the night. < Enough with the Bible stuff. It’s freaking me out. And over what? A few washed up sand castles? >

She made a sign of the cross three times, across her forehead, chest, and palm. Then, the engineer turned to me. < All life is, is washed up sand castles. Don’t you see, Gale? Even the current moment shall be gone. >

< We said that it was all forever. >

< One day, I shall forget > She came closer, and grasped my hand. My fingers, under her control, traced a fourth and final cross over her bust, moving from big intense eyes that mellowed not over the years to the chest that swelled since their childhood, then from slight shoulder to slight shoulder. < I will know our future days, but the time we have is to be lost and never regained. >

< I’ll believe you when you tell me. > Goading her would not work, but I was in the habit of futility. < Just answer me once: will you always know me? >

Her tongue darted out, then hid behind pursed lips. < The future has all possibility. >

< Please. >

She shook her head, but fell silent. The waves on the shore were loud, more than a hundred conch shells. Soon, but a short eternity past her hesitation, was a whisper that fell away into the evening that settled upon the day: < I will always know that I loved you now, at this very moment. >

< You can’t say that. > I was taken aback, and checked around me to see if Timothy was close. < In the first place, you said there was a point past which nothing can be known. >

< I have faith. That is the greatest knowledge of all. By grace of God, may I face those lost latter days, past the final horizon. > She stood, and pointed in the direction of the parking lot. < I see his hat over there. Look, the little green cap. >

I would learn later the significance of this in Chinese culture, but at that time I was oblivious. All I could think about was that as Catherine, the pianist’s best friend, the sister in Christ of my fiancée, walked away to join with her husband, I wished that I had the courage to say that if it meant I could believe in a life of weekly scripture readings with her, I would swear by her God’s name for the rest of my days.

A panoramic landscape capturing the ephemeral nature of creation, with a wide, open beach at sunset. The beach is strewn with intricate sandcastles, symbolizing temporary creations that are both beautiful and fleeting. The setting sun casts a warm, golden light over the scene, evoking a sense of transience and the beauty of the moment. This image reflects the idea of enjoying the creative process, aware of the impermanence of both the creation and the creator.

It always comes back to the beach, those rolling landscapes of shining sand, oddly similar to the blankets I stared at during afternoon naps as a child.

These thoughts are coming to me at exactly the right time. We can leave anything behind, and take anything away. There is a music to everything I am doing, and I know my writing to be a fundamentally musical activity. This gives my muse a test of knowledge, for in all cases I hear my words and judge them by the lens of poetry, the rule of rhythm and rhyme seeking its point and purpose. In all things there is the emergent song, the melody elided and in stretto, the waves rising above the beach and crashing with the force of infinite tsunamis in the vast imagination of the fearful who cannot bear to drown. Yet we shall drown, as everything pulls together and leads itself into the silence of the sea at rest in the aftermath of the Lord’s command.

We were once mosquito bites, once dazzling sunlight, and two grains of sand among millions, washed upon the same beach, as it was written.

We leaned into mystery, tackling the snake—fang and venom—as it was.

The vocation of any believer, of anyone who has truly understood the gospel and seen it as the miracle that it is, is to be quiet in one's heart and to find stillness. It is to fret no longer about the institutions that man has created, about the precise boundaries of any idea, about allegiances to the angels and demons we dubbed as overlords. When we accomplish that, we walk with God along the beach, and may begin to truly understand what it means to take a single step. Before then, we are doomed to float about and be carried away by the wind—though even now, any one person is but a paper bag drifting from one side of the television screen to the other.