I’ve never been into new year’s resolutions.

I’ve never bought into the idea that you magically get granted a new chance at midnight on the fall of the 31st each December.

I like to think that you can start over whenever you want. Each day is new beginning, another chance to suckle something more out of life. Believing anything else would depress me. Besides, time is just a construct. You are either alive or you are not, able to grow and change, or not.

Yet, I can’t deny the feeling of freshness that January brings in like the tide each year. I cannot help but feel that December is the bottom of the slide and January is the very top. There is something, just something, about it that feels like potential energy. Like resting your feet in the starting blocks at a track meet and waiting for that grumpy man to fire that god forsaken gun, telling you that yes, it is time to go.

It is, without a doubt, time to go.

But before I do that, before I crawl out of this knee deep search for exposed brick apartments across New York City and step inside of that first, tiny space that will make the whole process so so worth it, I am here. I am walking on the beach, watching the waves, quietly saying goodbye to the place that I was from. (Thank you Didion for that one)

This is about that.

WINTER WATER

If you don’t know, there is a unique divinity that overtakes the ocean in the middle of winter.

It becomes, somehow, more wild. Less touched. Maybe it’s the lack of tourists floating in inner tubes or half-covered-in-sunscreen-children screaming as the waves crash, but I have always respected the ocean more in the winter than I have in the summer. It claims itself. It dares you to come near. Turbulent currents and thrashing, dark blue waves choreograph a dance all their own. While families from Iowa and Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Texas, tremble at the shore, completely amazed beyond all rational reason at the mere sighting of a seagull. A boat. A big wave.

It’s breathtaking. All of it.

Breathtaking in a way that cannot ever be perfectly articulated if you are not standing right there in front of it. But if I had to try, I would tell you that standing there is is like witnessing infinity. It is like standing in front of the largest, scariest, most chaotically brilliant thing that you have ever seen, never minding the ever present possibility of it just swallowing you whole. Maybe even loving it a little bit more because of that.

I was walking and then I was running, running like I haven’t run since track meets in high school, barefoot and blazing. The faster I went the more kaleidoscopic my vision became. The world simply swirled around me, every other thing that has ever mattered just falling away. Falling into the sand and washing out to sea like the ocean has done for me my whole life.

That’s what I was thinking about anyway when I did stop. Far past the people, far past the commotion, I sat down on what felt like another planet. No people, no footprints, no noise. Just you and the very brink where civilization ends and the natural world begins. Little sandpipers dance on the shore where the wet sand reflects the hazy sun like a mirror, asking you to look into it and tell it what you see.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

I see myself as a child, running barefoot and bare hearted along the shoreline, red plastic bucket in one hand and sunlight in the other.

She is so small. She knows nothing and everything and something. Something I can’t remember now, but am trying all the time. I see myself a little older, learning how to dive under the waves that I told my dad were surely going to drown me but that he promised wouldn’t. He was right. Turns out that some things, most things, are not so bad if you’re willing to try. If you’re willing to close your eyes and dive, never knowing if you will come back up. I always came back up.

I see myself older still, returning to those waters to beg them to wash me clean of heartbreak. Every day for an entire summer I waded into those waves like a ghost, feeling myself return to life a little bit more each time. It was such a relief to float on my back in that sea, to not, for once, have to hold myself up. It felt like love. Like safety. The lifeguard could wave that red flag all day long and it was still the safest place for me. I don’t think I have ever been changed by something as much as I was by that summer.

And then, I see myself as I am now, at twenty-one with one foot out the door into another life while one is still planted firmly on this beach. Planted right here where I know the history of my life can be found, read, understood.

For looking at that ocean now, I see all that it holds of me. I know it and it knows me. In the distance I can still see that first heartbreak still bobbing in the waves, far from me now. It took that pain away and it carries it for me still. I thank it for that.

But more than anything, while I apartment hunt across New York City, I thank it for being my home. For knowing me and loving me and letting me go. I promise to come back. To visit. To press bare feet into wet sand and watch the sandpipers dance on the extraterrestrial surface of a world utterly untouched by the corrosive reaches of humanity. At least, it almost feels that way.

Happy new year.

Love, m.

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