Monday morning sometime between 5 and 6 am
We’ll see how this goes. I woke up at 5 am and then went to the beach, after nursing the baby and kissing a sleeping husband. The ocean is even more terrifying during the moonlight morning hours. There is just a crescent, a glowing smile, near Orion and I could not find Cassiopeia though I don’t she is misplaced. The foam at the rims of the waves picks up the moonlight and moves it foot by foot across the incoming crest.
Sunrise, it seems, is not for another hour and fifty minutes. The sea wind is cool on my exposed legs. It is dark on this beach. I decide to go home.
I write for a bit on the porch and then when I look up I see the first pink swath across the horizon. Am I brave enough now to go to the water again? I was brave earlier, the kind that comes with the trepidation of being small and utterly unknown in the world. The huge sea could swallow my body whole and no one would ever see.
Now the pink has added a strip of orange. There’s a purple to the grey that indicates the canvas is not the dark cloak you thought it was. My body says: now, spring for it. I just got settled on this porch but I think I had better be off.
By the time I get back to the beach it is 6:06 am and there is already an ochre tint smeared atop the orange. Strange clouds that look like a stamp of mountaintops pattern two points on the horizon. Do they mean weather? Does it rain much? On my walk here I am startled by my shadows – two long alien figures loom up at me suddenly in the glare of a delivery truck’s lamps.
Between the noise of the traffic and the roar of the waves is a strip of scrub brush singing with all manner of creatures greeting the pre-dawn. Now the stamped cloudlands hum with a primeval fire, tinged red and gold and soft pink. Who lives there, suspended between the mysterious sea and the unearthly floating kingdom?
Perhaps Care Bears.
This morning when I felt most alone in the darkness I saw a pinpoint of light approach. This is it, I thought: mother of two disappears on vacation. Body never found. And then from the terrible darkness just ahead of the spotlight bounds a shaggy canine, his gait so full of freedom and satisfaction. He takes a loping path, backwards to the light, ahead to tidal discoveries, up and down. I discern the shape of a human, light emanating from the center point of a head, and in the great darkness I can make out the rhythmic angular strides of a woman. She is power walking. I am saved from my great loneliness by this dog and this walker.
In these early morning hours, the presence of humans means the world will wake up and, as light contemplates its creep across the sky, so we too will consider the day ahead. From where I sit most way up the dunes I can see two other early risers. A woman who has crossed my path stoops to a discovery at her feet, and again a few yards later. What does she find at the waters edge? How many steps on how many mornings?
There is a no turning back from this sunrise. Three birds, still just black cutouts of bird shape, bird likeness, fly low over the water. They are to my left, flying left, but I didn’t see them cross in front of me. Perhaps the sea took them in the darkness and now gives them up at the first sign of morning. Perhaps they are spirits from the cloud city, harbingers of day. You can’t go back to the night, they warn.
My body sits at an angle, facing directly the brightest point in the sky or rather the midpoint between the two sections of horizon that have not surrendered their velvety purple greyness to the light. I can’t see the sun but I am already enveloped in its presence.
My shoes covered in sand. My chambray shirt. The bright orange beach towel. All these things surrender up their soft colors with a contented sigh.
A dozen sea birds have converged at water’s edge to give up the night though they are but dark bird shapes with no clarity or uniqueness. A man is standing staring into the sea, his body turned like mine toward the encroaching brightness that grows with intensity but still does not reveal its source. Later it will warm my sensitive skin, and bake the bronzed women splayed out inelegantly on colorful beach chairs. For now it seems content to slowly retrace the first colors of morning, the blushes and hints, greedily transforming them into the brightness of pure day. Neither yellow nor gold, just pure sky light.
The man still stands motionless. The birds march with urgency toward the water. A crab skitters to a stop near me, and freezes in place, as the horizon surrenders to white, to a new day.
