I find few activities more refreshing than spending time at the beach. After a particularly stressful week, and the aforementioned mental exercises of trying to figure out the direction my life should take, I took off to the beach for a few days. I love unplanned, spur-of-the-moment trips because you don’t have time to overplan. I threw a few outfits, sunblock, shades, and a bathing suit in my bag and I took off to meet my dear friend in Ocean City.
It’s not partying with my girlfriends that I love so dearly. It’s not sunning myself, rubbing sand on my feet, or the boardwalk. It’s the water. I am freakishly, devotedly, obsessed with and comforted by water. For all my recent worrying, which has been literally constant– sleepless nights, distractions, all-consuming stress– the ocean holds a refreshing cure. Coming off the 90 bridge, and the 20-degree drop in the breeze you feel when you cruise over the water, soothes my perception of everything. The smell of pine as it only smells near shore– not thick and heady, smoke-laced like in the mountains, but salted and brisk– clears my head like smelling salts. And I can’t stay out of the water.
When I was a kid, I’d burn myself on the shoulders and face every time we went to the beach. That’s because I was always neck-deep in the ocean, just riding the swells, rolling in the surf. I find the same satisfaction in rivers, streams, lakes, anywhere. Anywhere I can submerge my face and hair, float weightlessly, refreshes me. But the sea this morning, flushing my sinuses as I took crests to the face, scooping me up as I giggled and splashed, was amazingly restorative. I swam well past the breakers, floating on my back with my eyes closed and tensed to the thrill of irregular waves. The water was choppy today. Big, rolling waves came in with high tide, some pulling me backwards and underneath before spitting me up for air with my hair flipped forwards.
But even when the current grabs me, even when I’m thrilled by the water’s power and it holds me under just long enough to leave me breathless, I’m never afraid of it. I’m always at peace in water. I threw myself on top of countless swells before finally choosing one to ride in. I feel utterly fearless and a new kind of free. I will sleep soundly tonight rocked by sea legs, smiling faintly at the personal and inescapable pleasure of being a body at rest still feeling the lingering pulse of the sea.
