Proof

Proof

The sticky evening air waited outside dense with mosquitoes, but unwelcome air conditioning froze me within, as we’d sat for over two hours going over details from 7 years ago. Shifting on the rattan sofa, with stiff foam cushions. turning the glass in my hand around and around, fingerprinting it. You sat straight up on the kitchen chair quickly tapping your foot. You only did that in airports as seating was being called.

I just found out you’d left your first ex for your last. Now wondering if I was next in that queue. How you had portrayed your version of the past. I couldn’t see the larger picture. You couldn’t see what I exposed to you. I kept staring at the condo’s painting of a white paned window opening to a bright azure ocean whose artificial buttercup yellow sun was shining from above, yet whose shadows were cast from beyond the horizon. The panes were not proportionate and if you’d closed them completely, they would’ve only shut halfway. Yet, looking out the real window next to it wasn’t sufficient. All the silhouettes of palm fronds blocked any view of the moon.

I didn’t take my small purse of essentials I carried everywhere. Even that was often the brunt of your jokes as it included a plastic pill box, mace, inhaler, small bottle of water, password book and rfd wallet. You would notice this and maybe stop me. But you didn’t. Despite the cool night air, I didn't take a sweater. I was shaking so badly, but not from the cold.

I only grabbed my phone in hopes you would try to reach me as I never left like that. I pictured you frantically typing, and I would relish sending a cryptic, “I’m fine. Not ready.”

I said, “I’m taking a walk.”

No response.

Walking at a fast pace, trying to avoid clumsiness, virtually on my tip toes, wincing at each step over thousands of tiny shells. When I’d read this place was famous for ‘shelling’, this was not what I had in mind. I was supposed to be searching for one in the bright sunlight, carefully picking up each one, looking at its detail, then placing it lovingly in my pocket, not haphazardly crushing them in the dark like worthless peanut shells on a slimy bar floor.

When my perverted version of shelling stopped, I realized I’d reached the beginning of the boardwalk. About fifty feet welcoming during the day, but now transformed into a walk of dread. But I could now see the moon peaking from behind clouds.

I’d watched countless Dateline specials where the narrator would speak in an almost sing songy tone, as he slowly unraveled stories of picturesque sleepy little towns where ‘crimes’ were usually relegated to running a stop sign in a seven -stop -sign community. Where entertainment meant watching bi-annual parades of the local marching bands and beauty queens. Phrases like, “When the Johnson family moved here, little did they know how their lives would be turned upside down”.... His storybook tone seemingly meant for a small child continued despite more revealing details of gruesome murders and mysterious kidnappings.

In half terror and half excitement in wondering if this was the last time I would be seen alive as witnesses recounted my story to the news crews, thoughts of your first girlfriend’s reaction surfaced like the bodies that had been dredged up, and I continued on.

As the ocean breeze started getting brisker, and I noticed the soft rustling of the tall grasses, my shaking stopped. Looking back at the condominiums and houses where I’d come from, I stopped, afraid of turning back. But the moon suddenly came out completely from behind the clouds, casting long shadows, taking away my hesitancy, luring me closer to the shoreline. A new source of anger took root. Thoughts shifted from, “Who will notice if I’m gone?” to “ Why do I have to be fearful, when the other gender can walk freely, without any concern, with or without the calming glow of the moon?”

The four foot wide stick straight wooden planks ended, where the sandy, narrow, uneven and winding path started. The grasses reached the height of my waist. I took a deep breath, as if about to wade into ice cold water. Still clutching my keys between my fingers, their jagged ends pointing downward, as I’d heard women should do when in an unknown, ‘questionable’ environment, I proceeded, calculating my chances of being able to run back to safety were decreasing, as the buildings grew distant. But the thought of running away from wild beauty back to the familiar was absurd.

A small black shadow suddenly jumped out into the path. I stopped and as my eyes adjusted to the light, saw it was only a small black hare with long ears, indiginous to the island. Wanting to reach out and pet it, knowing it would not allow me, it hopped away.

Too far to turn back. I had gotten a scent of the salt air, and heard the waves.

I stood now on the beach itself, pausing to look in both directions, first at the city, its long row of lights to the left, curving away to a small pinpoint, where their glow reached into the sky and looked like a phosphorescent cloud. Then looking the opposite way, where mainly residential buildings lay in the dark, but this only accentuated the light from above.

A small sandpiper flitted through the shallow water, picking at something. Something only slightly larger than a grain of sand was sustaining this energetic bird.

My breathing had slowed down and I now looked at my phone- almost an hour had passed with no incoming words of regret or concern. Brief disappointment. No chance for gloating. I looked up, hearing the sound of a jet plane. The lights, red and white, moved so slowly, relative to me. A trick of the eye. An object weighing more than three hundred tons traveling at 400 miles per hour seemingly effortlessly through the air.

Nothing happened. No one approached me. Looking back at the moon, I decided to capture this moment, I took several photos, blurry and brighter than what I saw, expecting the lens would somehow not keep trying to compensate for the low lighting as the human eye did. I almost started to edit them, to make them look the way I perceived the view, the way it actually looked in reality. Darker, more sublime. But this time, I left them as they were. My lens had adapted against my wishes, but I refused to change that to something more charming to suit the aesthetic of my albums.

Heading back, I walked heavily over the shells, as guilt-free as ripping apart a beautifully wrapped gift, now the loud crunching that would’ve put a chip -eating ASMR to shame, brought relief and satisfaction. I came back in, tossed my phone on the bed, changed into my swimsuit, and walked slowly to the pool with nothing in hand, a towel draped over my shoulders. Voices of partiers from a nearby balcony, drifted above. The warmth not of the water, but of buoyancy of floating freely alone filled me.