Dare County Regional Airport

Initially, he couldn't find anybody who knew how to get there...yes, by car for sure.  And another one mentioned something about a bus...God knowing how long that would take.

No.

He needed to get there, faster than most humanly possible.  No commercial airlines were able to get any closer than Norfolk but that still required another couple of hours by car.  The thought of sitting in tunnel traffic made him feel almost nauseated.  He couldn't imagine sitting idly in a car trying to get to someplace fast.

So he called a friend he knew in college...a friend who constantly posted on Facebook pictures of his progress in becoming an amateur pilot...hell he was even building his own plane.  The only awkward part was it had been 30 years since he had last spoken to him...but they picked right up where they had left off...well not exactly but close.  You see the last time he had really been with his pilot friend was at William & Mary, as juniors on a weekend trip and he had to sit calmly and quietly in a girl's sorority lobby while the pilot friend loudly hooked up with said girl in the bathroom.  Nearby.  It was an awkward yet bonding experience for sure.

So the pilot friend laughed at the memory and while not completely understanding the motivation, he agreed to fly him down to get as close as possible as speedily as possible.




Flying in a small propeller plane is nothing like commercial airlines....the winds are more impactful and flying at a lower altitude makes the scenery more compelling...he flew down the coastline so to his left was the initially light blue darkening to an almost purple as the Atlantic spread out away from him.  The surf in its white streaks scribbled up and down the beaches and people dotted the landscape with colorful umbrellas and blankets.

As he felt the plane move inland and start to lower he knew he was starting to land.  It was very noisy in the plane and he had taken off his headphones so he wouldn't hear the mindless chatter of the pilot and air traffic controllers.  It was a white noise though...soothing.

Like catching her in a lazily sleeping braless moment.

He watched the treelines starting to get larger, knowing as his ears popped that they were descending.  The ocean was now at their backs and the inlet waters, green and sparkling with dots of sunlight were now beneath them.

From the air, Dare County Regional Airport looks like two white lanes against the terrain, just a small terminal and it nestles on an island near the barrier outer banks.

Somewhere, on that ocean, she was nearby.  Somewhere, right on the waterline.  She might even notice a small plane, or hear the drone of its engine.  Never would she guess he was coming to see her.

He watched as the plane oriented itself along the axis of the runway, watched the ground start its ascent towards them and the slight bump when the wheels touched down.

The plane taxied a short ways, pulling up near the terminal and he shook his friend's hand and gave him double the cash he originally quoted.  His friend protested but he shook it off and made him take it.

He opened the door, the sun exploding on him and the breeze carrying the scent of the ocean and wax myrtles, and he remembered those trees blooming in Spring and being "daintily aromatic".
The sky was a blue that you only saw near the ocean and he felt like he was a bit in an undertow...her presence nearby, her gravity pulling him towards her.

He remembered a Roxy Music song and hummed it as he waited for his cab.

In the Middle of a Night

It's like waking up in a strange bed, in a strange house...disoriented from the darkness in the middle of a night...unfamiliar surroundings, different furniture...perhaps not too far removed from just one drink not needed.

Perhaps it is the comfort of a cold glass of water at the bedside to restore familiarity...to re-orient and remind that this is a vacation house...away from the normals. Away from many, many things.

At once restorative and contemplative...hours to while away, no deep thinking necessary.  Just a blank-slate mind erased for a little while, to undo knots in a mind, let things tethered go untethered.  Release a black balloon of worry and let it disappear.

With the return of a normal heartbeat, with the slowing down of normal breathing, the body slips back into a comfort that it can collect and gather and cocoon you into...while the mind lets itself go unmoored and starts to wander on the dark sea that makes up the time after midnight.

The world starts to dissipate, the sun remains in some other world, the hint of the next day is but a ghost...there is nothing to keep the eyes from closing and remaining so for as many hours as one can go.

And then, like flicker from a lighthouse, across that black sea after midnight...a small and tiny but brilliant thought of you inserts itself into my mind...and triggers, like a hunger, an unsatisfied emotion that reluctantly starts to blaze inside me...this little craving that will once again plague me as I struggle to re-find sleep in the middle of a night.

Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy

Awake with me...rustle the sheets and with your bed-head hair and sleep-warm skin pull me into an embrace...a quick whisper in my ear about something that sounds like coffee and then you disappear downstairs.

Arise with me...resting the cups of steaming java on the fence posts, the air crisp...fresh-scrubbed and filled with just a hint of sea-breeze...the waves small and glassy, just lazily licking at the slope of the beach.  Your kiss tastes of last night's dreams, last night's salt, last night's taste of you...and a little bit of coffee.

Adjoin with me...grab towels and sunscreen, a large cooler of ice and Summer Shandy, vodka and cranberry in case we over-stay our welcome at the water and get too lazy to come up...find a quietness that is just ours, a quaintness that reminds us of when we were very small and ventured to the beach...wide-eyed and innocent.  Let us remind ourselves how small we are...let me remind you how you loom in my mind, you bloom in my brain...you remind me of the things that I find hard to put into words, hard to define...and the closest things are similar to describing the ever-changing blues of the waters before us.

Adjourn with me...let the day define us by the pink of our skin as we get nuzzled by the sun...oblivious in the warm winds...the empties of the bottles tinkling in the cooler, the ice just cold clear water...the salt in our hair, wind-blown and full...the ocean still heaving against the sand, the sun behind us and in its last quarter...we won't need the sunset as I'd rather take in the pinks of you.  I'd gather the belongings, hold as much as I could in the left hand...with my right I'd reach down and pull you up...pull you towards me...watch you melt into me the way the sun is melting somewhere in the west.

Pie

The day is divided into day-parts...24 hours, a bunch of minutes too high to calculate on my fingers...I allocate portions...a piece of pie to each day.

Here for sleep, perhaps less than I would care for...

Here for when I get to drink...less than I would care for.

The day has its milestones like almost always...I wake, I drink coffee, I drive to work against a cement forest and traffic...I plug in and I communicate.  I spread my thin wafers of time against a day of demands and requests....

My work consumes me like the weather...I have to respond...I have to be in it...hurricane or gorgeous day.  It fills me with a paycheck that makes me get up the next day...and the next.

The evenings are very slight...tiny moments in the amount it takes for a sun to decline over a western line.  Then dinner...then a drink or more.

The day begins...I rise and I carve out the pieces and allocate them.  Distribute them for those that need a piece of me.


But there is another day...another set of sunrises and sunsets...a brief interlude or an invasive thought...another set of minutes and hours.  And like a broken clock the hands don't move forward but rather backward.

They spin off back into a time that is so much the opposite of my current day.

The bits of my day that are taken by you...devoted to you...allocated to you.  Surprisingly they appear in a song on a radio, a reflection in a mirror...a bed still warm beneath the covers...and the mind moves into a space that you only occupy.

In my mind there is a clock of you...that remembers and records...it tracks our time together and then spools backwards to remind me of it.

It is the direct opposite of the minutes that I awake to that remind me that we are spending another day apart.

Absence

Yeah.

What color is loneliness?
What moves your eye when there is absence?

Plucked...that is the verb, the attribute...like when you are holding something in your hand and it is snatched away from you...possibly never to return.

The quick conversations.  The slightest of interactions.

If you could be just a bruise for a day...punch me, mark me.  Stay on me in a brief tattoo.

But the skin doesn't reveal what the heart knows.  Or what the mind retains.

Huge libraries of books about you...written about you, descriptions of you.  Latin, music, chorales and diatribes.  I spend the days trying to describe a you that I know to a world that only knows flowers and petals...colors and purples...sunsets and sunrises...pale moons and see-through seas...that's all they know.  They don't know the complexity of the view I have of you...the indescribable.  The phantom.

How do you communicate with only your hands.  How do you communicate with only a raised eyebrow?

Against a default setting where you find yourself not like the way I see you...you find faults and flaws...you find challenges and issues.

I strive...I climb walls...knock down doors to illuminate...like you were in a stone filled room with no windows I look to have you catch a simple glimpse.  The slight corner of your eye of a color or of some light.

Something piercing...something breaking through.

I've spent a million words attesting to your beauty but they fall wooden upon you.

I am not sure how to convince you that you are beautiful...not just in the classic sense but in the casual one as well.

Indulge me...pretend you are...persuade yourself.

Remember when you were in a mirror and loved it...and galvanize that....that is what I see.  That is my strike mark.

That is what I remember.

And ironically...when I perhaps see you again, that is my default.

A crystalline view of the person that I find again and again...and my gaze and my appreciation for a face that is so fetching I cannot stand its absence.

Renovations

The one thing she had asked for was very complicated, probably costly and of all the things he felt were needed this wasn't one of them.

I want an outdoor shower...on the east side, with a rainfall spigot and wide white tiles and a wall just up to my shoulders...

He looked up at her, looking up from the drawings of some proposed changes to the bungalow that were critical...kitchen, gas lines, water hook-ups and the like.  There was an existing bathroom with its own internal shower...it was a few feet from being outside and had no windows.

It's not even in the plans we considered and signed off on.

Her mouth became a straight line, actually turning down a bit at the corners.  He set down his pencil.

She continued...I got up this morning, early while you were still sleeping.  Went out on this very first morning, the first time here...and was able to catch the sunrise.  It was super quiet, just barely a few birds...but it....she trailed and turned from him a little.  It reminded me of when I was growing up, and the day was going to be full and I couldn't wait for it to start.

Well hopefully you'll have many more of those times.

I know...but I wanted to be in a place where I could start my day as well...and I thought, how about outside?  How about in a quiet relaxing place where I could start clean.  And the next thing you know is I want an outside shower.

Saying no, introducing doubt...he hated when it happened.  She was not a gambler, although she would have won many times with her lack of revealing.  He could detect just the slightest edge when she was unhappy with him...it wasn't overt.

But to say no, against the wishes of her...well...that was just plain stupid.

Okay...where do you want it?

She smiled and led him outside to show him where the shower might be.



If I build it here, I'm going to have to cut down those trees and limb those ones over there.  Just so you have the perfect view.

They were standing at the east end of the bungalow, and while the space was available the view wasn't.  Trees, limbs and some other areas needed to be cleared.

She leaned cross armed.

He hired the gardening team the next day to clear out the views out to the east of the bungalow.  She was online, looking at tiles for the shower and rain spigots...she even asked about wiring for speakers but he told her bluetooth waterproof ones could be better.

She agreed.


That night, in the dusk that happened so quickly in the Caribbean, they were laying on the sofa.  Intertwined.  The bottle of bourbon was nearly empty...the waves could be heard lapping lightly at the  open windows and open doors.  It was pitch black outside as the only lights were across the bay.


I'm going to love that shower, she whispered.

They had put on some Pandora, a slightly jazzy funk style with some spanish guitar influence...he could smell her shampoo and her lotions.  Her skin was warm against his in a way that was warmer because it was familiar.  Known.  He loved that he knew every inch of her, favored certain inches more than others...but loved the landscape.  With her this close he could be anywhere...but the fact that it was a deserted island in the fact that they were the only two on it was very compelling.

The small addition of the shower...to make her happy beyond the fact that there was a tropical island in her name was even more enjoyable.

It's the small things...I'm quite happy that adding that will make you happier.

Yeah....It will.

A bit of quiet and he knew...he could almost hear the wheels in her head turning.  Something else was coming.

So...as you know, the typical sunrise takes about 8 minutes, once the Sun is emitted from the surface.
But a sunset lasts like 15 minutes.

He leaned up, she released from him in a slide and laid back.  Where are you going with this?

He heard her voice in the dark...it was one of his favorite sounds...the drawl of the south, near oceans and salt...the additional layer of bourbon to slow it down and make it huskier...these moments he wished he could hear her just recite poems or choruses....like provide her a book and just simply listen...the way rain sounds on a screen or the chirp of summer insects outside an open window.  It calmed him...soothed actually.  And he understood it was a trap...it created deeper wants, to cover the mouth emitting the words in a kiss, a covering...but he let her proceed.

well...

Well...?

Well what if had a pool on the western side....so we could watch the sun set out west?  We could make it a little bigger, maybe a bit bigger than a hot tub, but something we could sit in...have a drink...watch the evening end?

He reached over and poured the last drops of the bottle into her glass.  He got up and opened the other bottle on the counter.  He had brought his glass and poured a splash into his.
He wasn't a math major, but in his head he was trying to do some.  Costs and budget were hard to come by him, easier for her.  But she was asking...these seeds of ideas.  And he was a fulfiller.  That's unfortunately or fortunately what she had created in him.

Willie Wonka.  We are the dream makers.  It was what he was trying to do for her.

I am quite confident that to begin the day with you in the shower, and end the day with you in a pool...is probably the very definition of a heaven that I literally do not deserve.  And to spend those moments of waking and pre-sleep just alone aside you in a shared bed...a space...a couch...would be a place that I am pretty sure I'd be willing to spend the rest of my life.

She picked up her glass and clinked it against his.

It was pretty much a done deal.

Alternatives

There was a moment...like a whisper you just might have heard...the water was warm, not bathtub heat but rather body temperature...his feet had found the smooth white sand in about five feet in the small beach area...the waterline around his chest level, rising and falling in the tide.  He was remarkably amazed that he could see his feet in the crystal clear blue...maybe it was green.  It didn't matter...he could sense the water against him and he could see to the bottom...

a bit of it splashed upwards...into his mouth, a nice warm salt.

This is you, he thought, immersed in the breeze and the air, the wind from a tide in his hair.  The sun was perfect, the lights dimming...the horizon just a sleek line.  I am in you, he thought...and it wasn't a sexual act, but rather a part where the minds of two are one, and the body length is condensed.

Rather, while he had been in her, this was something different.  He thought this as he swayed slightly in the surf on their island.

Their island.

He still stammered it...the concept.  The thought.

And then, like a welcome shape he saw her on the beach, walking down the sands and where the ocean put small waves at her feet.  In her hand was a bottle.

He looked up, where the sky was a blue ceiling...no clouds, not even a hint.  The water around him was body temperature...he agreed at that.  He felt like he may have felt when they were together in the dark, in the sweet mystery of her, and the moment when the bodies collided...but instead of darkness he saw everything.

It was a bit overwhelming.

And now she was walking towards him, the surf nibbling at her thighs and engulfing her.

Engulfing.

Such a perfect word...it was what she did every day to him.