Old Man & Beachside

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

credit from pinterest, does not remotely look like the beach that I went to but whatever :)

“Stay still and calm, or else they’d sting you,” says the old man.

“They can sense your fear and you don’t want to end up in the ER with a bee sting.”

The canopy above makes everything feel slower, greener — jade, almost, the kind of green that presses against you. There’s two shades of blue in the water, or maybe the lake and the ocean are bleeding into each other here, I’m not in the mood to test which. On the other end of the water, just barely, houses — a pinch of orange, plain white — sitting there the way distant things do, present but not quite real. Mother nature keeps her own counsel.

I took a deep breath, snorted : “who are we to judge if they decide to sting me. They existed long before we did. I think they’ve earned the right to destroy us, given what we’ve done to the order of things.”

My fingers are still on the same page. Unbothered, just distracted by how nice the day was.

“That’s rather nihilistic.”

“That’s not nihilism.”

“Sorry miss, I’m not the one with a book in my palm here.” I noticed then that he had a thick accent — could be Italian. What is an Italian old man doing here. They have much better views than us.

The bees had gone quiet, or perhaps I had stopped hearing them. The old man shifted beside me, the particular shift of someone who has learned to exist inside silences without filling them. Italian, I thought again. Or not. What does it matter where a person is from when they are here, at the edge of this water, watching the same orange pinch of house dissolve slowly into afternoon.

The book in my lap had ceased to be a book some time ago. It was just weight now, the comfortable kind, like a hand that isn’t holding yours but is near enough.

The jade deepened. That is the thing about this kind of green — it does not stay still. It moves the way feeling moves, before you have named it, before you have decided whether it is grief or something gentler. The water received it without comment.

I thought: we are very small here. Not in the way that frightens, but in the way that briefly, mercifully, releases you from the obligation of being large.

The bee landed on my wrist and left.

“You didn’t move,” said the old man.

“No,” I said.

He seemed satisfied with that, or not satisfied exactly — settled. The way the houses across the water were settled, white and orange and almost not there, holding their ground on the other side of something neither of us would cross today.

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Writer’s notes: Hey everyone! It's been a couple of months since I've shown up here, and I wanted to explain — I've been deep in my other great love: dancing. It's been a passion since childhood, right alongside losing myself in a good brick-sized book, and lately I've been pouring myself into getting better at it. Life balance is still very much a work in progress, but I'm finding my way back. I'll be slowly catching up, and I'd genuinely love to read your work — please do share! Wishing everyone a wonderful summer, wherever in the world you are.

Much love,