Beach House

The beautiful thing about a beach house is that it only exists for a weekend. Walking through the sea-coloured two-story perched on stilts to soak up sea pressure, its nautical effects winking from every corner, everything appears slightly tousled, the sheets as sifted and loosely tangled as the lovers who slept in them. Lovers like friends watching television in bed while everyone else is at the beach. When cloudy means wispy nebula as white as teeth, porous, like perforated blank pages drifting across the blue sky. On that afternoon my tan deepened as I read in the sand. In the mirror on the way out I catch a glimpse of myself, bronzed. On the patio, four of us sit at a slate gray table, fingers running over traces of wax from outdoor candlelight dinner, and raise waxy cigarette paper, put fingers to lips, smoke. Deep. The joint’s warm mouth floats away from me, leaving a ring of warmth on my lips. We congratulate ourselves on the state in which we’ve left the house. Everything in its right place, just slightly tousled. “Goodbye house, we loved you.” I say repeatedly that I don’t want to leave. Yesterday at the beach I watched a little boy chase white gulls in circles, walked past an orange-beaked wild bird with neck for days; modest, it slipped between palm trees and disappeared. I took a picture, wore my sunglasses that work like an Instagram filter for the world. Sepia-toned like these moments are already memories, and I don’t even mind. The tide came in while I read, stained a copy of The Opposite of Loneliness, soaked my towel with sand. We went further inland and I sat up, made paranoid by the water, the way you are by a friend who likes to creep up on you. I glanced up and my gaze caught on blue bikini in brown water, fingertips dipping in and out of warm waves, then out on either side of her like she was one of those gulls. Inside the house, alcohol filled me and sloshed inside me like waves. I fell asleep, surrounded by friends; conversation, dulled to a murmur, roared like the ocean through a conch shell.