44. Most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen (in real life)?
Every summer my family (really just me and my mum) rent a cottage alongside a beach on the Atlantic for a week. The beach is beside a boulevard and it is infested with trashy beach culture, but our cottage is away from the boulevard a bit and anyway I love it because I’ve gone all my life and for some reason I’ve always felt strange connections to the ocean. I don’t know why.Â
A few years ago during our week there someone who was very important to me at the time decided that he didn’t like me as much as he thought he did, so he texted me this information and I felt like I was dying. I was stupid, around 14. But it killed me. The morning of the day we were leaving, though, I discovered this part of myself that tells me to just be alone and explore places when I get hurt like that.Â
So even though I was still practically a child I went to a cafe by myself while my mother was packing her things and got an iced latte very early and walked along the dawn-draped shore. At the end of the beach is a jetty which separates the area preserved for suntanning and tourism from the raw, reedy, rocky waves of the dark blue New England sea. On the jetty you can see in the distance a nuclear power plant.Â
Anyway, here’s where it is: on this morning during which I was truly alone for the first time in my life I stood on the jetty and the difference between the beach to my left and the wild ocean to my right became in my mind something like the youthful entropy I suffered under the night before, when he told me he didn’t like me very much, contrasted with the choppy creation of nature which was my future and the uncertainty and the depth of it which I felt like I had begun to cross into by stepping onto the jetty.Â
On the calm part of the beach right next to the jetty was an older woman, probably in her 60’s, in a yellow bathing suit. I remember so distinctly how yellow it was. Her face and hair were all grey, but somehow she — this woman in yellow against a backdrop of a colorless overcast morning at the shore — was the most beautiful thing I had (and have) ever seen. She was playing in the waves by herself with a pale like a little kid who would return to her mother when she’d get sand in her suit. I think she, the woman, was trying to trap crabs and got distracted by something inside herself which told her just to play. As far as I could tell, she never noticed me standing on the rocks.
And I think that she was the hope that starts swimming at the end of the chaos of youth like the end of the beach and that, if I’m lucky, will climb the jetty and desire to swim still in the uncertainty of the future. And also that view of the nuclear power plant which presided over the scene like some seeing deity: its energy would far outlive both my life and my silly metaphor.
The woman in yellow, and the juxtaposition of all those things, are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
It’s probably all very stupid but it’s the truth.
