Folly Beach

It was the sea air that he noticed...in the very early morning near the pier.  Even this late in the year, when most of the leaves were starting to turn up north the sea smelled like summer, not loosening up its grip on the warmth and the sun still waiting to rise above the slick black oil ink of the Atlantic.

She was near...it was one of those intuitions of proximity...like sometimes how the air would change before a thunderstorm.  She was like that at times...exploding in his head and deluging his thoughts with just a constant...her.  Her.

Her. 

As he watched the brief quickening of orange scratching away the morning's dark, he felt her more than anything else.  Like a locket around his neck.  It wasn't heavy...rather it was quite light...but he felt it as surely as if she had placed it there.

His car was illegally parked right at the tide line...thankfully it was going out and the engine still ticked from the long drive in the evening. 

He wasn't going to her...rather he just wanted to be close enough to feel...a moon to her planet...a gravitational pull...proximity. 

He actually wanted to just drive by where she might be staying, driving slowly enough that she might look up, might glance...and across the fifty feet or so she might widen her eyes in surprise and wonder...but not really believe.  And go back to her doings.

He was an interruption while she played like music in the background.  A soft relaxing song that he could hear without repetition.  He sometimes broke things and then used them clumsily. 

He wanted to cook for her, break into the kitchen at this ungodly hour and awaken her with smells of bacon and coffee...watch her bed-head hair emerge and greet him like a sunrise.

She was like that, actually as he watched a real one emerge and beckon the clouds to slowly dissipate and start spreading shades the color of warmth across the East.

She was the start of his day...no matter where she was...east, west.

She was the emergence of something warm and far away...beautiful but almost out of reach...he rose out of bed with her out there and him knowing that was her...a presence.  A morning...a fresh start, a new clock...

He didn't know when she would actually awaken...he hoped it would be when the sun was slightly higher so he waited, watching the shade pull up on the day...half expecting the local police to shoo him from his spot and hand him a hefty fine.

But for now the morning was his alone...alone on the beach and for all he could see alone in the world.
Except he knew she was close.
And as he watched the orange circle start its rise he knew that even if she was across the opposite of where he was, hundreds or thousands of miles away,

he would feel the lure of her...the pull.  The tide tugging you into the ocean, towards something beautiful.