a song for starlit beaches

Last weekend, Anna and I sat in a surf shop and sang. We sang to the melody of the guitar and the soft rhythm of the bongo drum. Renditions of old favorites reverberated on that warm, Bali evening and things felt exactly like they did just a few months ago. Bali felt like it had stayed still, trapped in time, without any accountability to the days of the week or the times of the day. All that mattered, once again, was the tide. The ocean coming in to greet anxious surfers who wait and wait for the perfect set. That night was as they always had been – me and Anna and Yopi and others who seemed to float in and out. And nothing else mattered. Not the fact that we couldn’t hold a tune or that my back and shoulders were on fire. It was just me and her and them and the warmth of the night. Surrounded by surfboards that had claimed stillness for the night. I told Anna as we walked back that the perfection of these moments was sometimes almost more than I could take. If I could somehow take these instances of time and pack them away in my pocket… so that I could take them out when I felt lonely or less than… Instant perfection is found there, on the wooden benches that surround Toba surf shop, where the memory of Raoul still lingers. Where we never run out of cigarettes never and the laughter never ceases. This is what Kundera must have meant when he talked about the unbearable lightness of being. I felt it and touched it and it brought me back to why exactly it would be so easy to resign myself to this simple life. Perhaps a romanticism of the facts, but more likely the closest I have ever come to the truth. To the pure release of goodness that plays along to the sound of the guitar. There are a million ways to kneel and kiss the ground. This is mine. I would love to one day live up to your words, Rumi. I would like not just to live up to them but to live them and to have them run through my veins. When she thanked humanity, I think that this is what she meant. And then we ended up on a lonely Balinese alley, waiting. Waiting and speaking quietly and dancing on the empty streets to reggae. To the gentle flow of the music that mingled with the comfortable quiet of the night.