The Path Back to Pebble Beach

The season changes

but the memories,

soaked in everlasting summer,

do not.

Even as the sun dips below the horizon,

tucks itself into the hills and curls beneath the valleys

before the first dinner service commences;

as the cars peel away from the potholed parking lot

to leave the staff accommodation building,

once an old hotel

now crooked

but not quite crumbling:

reinforced by a strange love that

any hospitality worker knows.

The kind of love that rotates and swells to fill

what space we are given

before contorting itself through small fissures

we mapped out as escape routes

before spring's frost had even had a chance to thaw.

It is living and breathing the people you

work, sleep, party

beside

until they slip away, off to another slice of the world,

another resort,

another adventure,

never saying "Good-bye"

only ever, "See you later."

Despite this, cradling beer-sticky Polaroids

of friends you may never meet again

to your name-tag chest

and hoping that

of all the harvested memories

your mind will one day revisit,

potholed and cloudy itself,

this snapshot -

drunk and singing Hallelujah around a

pebble-beach bonfire,

the stones shining like copper coins in the flames -

will be among the crop.