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Lucy, after I die,
I would like you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the many sand dunes
of Virginia Seashore.
Right here I’ve come each summer season for 3 and a half many years.
Right here you and Eleanor
discovered to swim within the ocean waves and bodysurf.
Right here your mom
and I as soon as walked hand in hand for miles and made love amongst
heat sand dunes
by starlight after we had been younger. We grew aside. Argued or saved silent.
Your grandmother and grandfather
died right here. Till the top, they may hear the surf breathe and sigh
as wind does
by deciduous timber. Seagulls crying. I maintain inhaling the therapeutic
salt air
and tasting the salt of saltwater. After I go away this spindrift life,
the Atlantic Ocean
will proceed. Kids will maintain chasing its waves
because the surf withdraws.
They are going to run from the waves because the surf comes thundering in. They play
tag with infinity.
Center-aged {couples} will stroll their black labs and golden retrievers on these
sands that the surf kilos
flat like a drunken fist pounding a clean oak bar to underscore
some obscure
convoluted level that neither the fist nor the bartender
can actually grasp.
For the reality is much past our attain. The reality is that on the day I die
a person shall be flying
a kite within the form of a crimson Chinese language dragon. It’s going to fly so excessive
he can barely
see it. Child noticed sharks with their leopard pores and skin wash up
lifeless on the shore,
their gills clogged with sand after storms. Teenage boys
maintain hurling
footballs forwards and backwards as if their muscled our bodies are metronomes
for the music
the ocean makes. Shy teenage ladies will maintain singing their pop songs,
so stuffed with unfulfilled
need, to the doo-wop, doo-wah of the surf. They are going to dye
their hair pink
or pale blue as cotton sweet. All of it would proceed because it at all times
does, nearly
the identical. Once I die, households will nonetheless maintain pitching their pastel-colored
awnings, shade tents,
and solar umbrellas like large dahlias and make their nomad
encampments
on the sand. They are going to keep every week or two after which depart
for extra everlasting
shelters inland. Lucy, I like nothing higher than strolling with you
for hours on the seaside.
First, north so far as Fort Story’s No Trespassing indicators.
Then south
three miles from 81st Road towards the boardwalk and motels.
A boy holds
a woman, whose lengthy legs wrap round him. He carries her into
the surf whereas she
screams ecstatically because the chilly waves buffet them. He staggers
however doesn’t fall.
You might be recovering from twenty-eight-hour shifts throughout surgical rotation
at medical college. You inform me
that your sole affected person yesterday had most cancers. It has metastasized
to lungs, kidney,
spleen, backbone, mind. “It’s inoperable,” you say. “There’s nothing
I can do,
besides make her comfy.” You imply extra oxycontin,
then morphine.
Yard-high letters within the sand spell STEPH HEARTS
DOLLY. All
our hundreds of bare footprints crisscross the sand.
A sandcastle
stands with terraces, towers, winding staircases, a moat,
and probably the most
delicate of arches over the moat. Nothing is all of the extra lovely
as a result of it’s
fragile. The tide is both coming in or going out.
I don’t know
which. With its bent, outstretched wings, a lone brown pelican
dive-bombs
the ocean, skims low, only some inches above the waves,
searching for fish.
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