When a place transends time and space, it can be hard to say goodbye.

The light flickers, revealing the side of her face in orange. Above, a nearly full moon fills in the shadows left by the fire, pale and light and blue. If you listen, the waves of the beach, shore twenty feet or less away. The fire crackles, smoldering and popping. We are at the point where the embers are plentiful and hot enough to set new logs ablaze without any paper towels or hand sanitizer underneath. This is not in the wilderness survival handbook, but alcohol doused paper towels make for one hell of a firestarter. She leans in, rests her head on my shoulder. This is one of the few places we do not speak to each other much. At home, with the tv on, we’ll pause it, on average, about every five minutes to either look something up or relate a story that whatever we are watching has reminded us of. I’d imagine we’re hell to watch tv with.

But here, on Loyola Beach, right by her house, where we met, and where we have so much history, here, tucked behind the dune with the tall grass, we sit by the fire, blazing in a pit we have dug into the sand with our hands. I am well into my forties at this point and still imagine my hands as construction excavators or steam shovels. We do not say much. There’s not much need.

The fire is transfixing, something reaches out to us from the primal, from a time when maybe our ancestors didn’t, or couldn’t speak much. We watch the flames lick and dance and burn, watch the sparks soar up like eagles in an updraft, swirling into the night and vanishing when they burn out and become ash. The waves at the shoreline and the water itself calls to me, and so, sandals already removed, I make my way across the sand to the pebbly part of the beach that makes me realize I have taken off my sandals too soon, and then into the water. It is early fall, warm enough for shorts still (if you’re brave or don’t have feeling in your shins from kicking Muay Thai pads too much), and cool enough for a fire. I wade in slowly, up to my ankles, then knees, then to just before the bottom of my shorts. 

The water is cool, consistent, and my feet slide under the sand like the bottom of the lake is embracing them, enveloping them. It is an odd and not altogether unpleasant sensation. I turn around to face inland, and there is my wife, visible in the glow of the fire. I tell her it's lovely in the water, and, with some trepidation, she makes her way to the edge, then in slightly, and eventually out to me. The dog rushes towards the water, keenly afraid of being left behind, but as the receding waves touch his paws, he retreats, only to do the same thing again, closer, further, closer, further…he is not a bright dog. 

Out there in the water, my wife holding me around the waist, waves crested with moonlight, a few other fires as orange dots along the beachfront, I am reminded of why this place is so special. Obviously, it is her beach, and therefore carries special meaning for both of us, but her in particular. This is where she comes for peace, for inspiration, for a reminder, visceral and immediate, that there is good in the world. On any given summer day, dozens upon dozens of families, and as many different cultures, have gathered here to be together. There are BBQ’s and tents and hammocks and soccer games and martial arts in the park and chess and fitness and an eighth of a mile strip of concrete bench that has been sectioned off, doled out to local artists, and painted in whatever way they see fit. There are dunes and seagrass and sunsets and rises, there are stars in the city, there is the skyline and college kids and weed smoke and beer bottles. There are dates and dog walks, bicycles and paleterias. There is a cafe that serves its own version of Dole Whip. Everyone tolerates if not celebrates each other, and there is very little drama, all things considered.

She has walked this beach a thousand times, has slept under the stars here, has laid in the sand or on a bench or on the grass and read, hours and hours I’m sure. She has brought people here to see it, to meet her, to say goodbye to, and she has been married here. This place is a part of her that transcends space. This beach goes beyond being a place, this beach is a state of being. The beach is a part of her.

To me, this beach is and will always be about her as much as it is the waves and sand and trails. This is where we met, this is where we learned about each other, this is where we ran together in grand fitness circles until it got too cold for me and her knees began to hurt. This is where I played guitar and sang for the first time in public, sat out in the darkness of midnight with her on those same painted benches. This is where I played with an ensemble of musicians, where I had a dawn walk, tears streaming from tired eyes, holding a conversation that would in effect decide what the rest of my life would look like. This is where we go to howl and celebrate the universe, and this is where I have said goodbye to friends, ceremonially by a very similar fire. 

So looking to shore from out in the water is something, I think, like Jim Lovell or Buzz Aldrin looking back towards Earth from near the moon. Everything that exists, all that ever was, can be seen by them in one frame. Obviously, this beach does not contain as much universally, but there is enough of our history, her and my history, here that it feels like there is almost too much there to see in one frame. And so we giggle and splash and try to stay upright in sinking mucky sand, and without thinking of the multitudes just out of view, we head back to shore to dry off by the fire, the dog calmed down a bit, and sand on everything. We sit, put another log on the fire and watch it catch over the pool of glowing embers that has now formed in the bottom of our pit. The log pops and hisses as it lets out heated air from beautiful imperfections inside the wood, the stars shimmer, and in circumstances like this, with her head on my shoulder, even the line of planes in their holding pattern out over the lake, seen as individual white headlight dots, is pretty. We spend a few more quiet moments sitting together listening. 

There are loud, happy voices further out the pier, there is wind rustling in the tall grass just behind us, the fire still crackles and waves still roll. These things are permanent, dependable. And to a woman who has never lived in one place longer than she has at an apartment near this beach, and to a woman who has succumbed to either necessity or wanderlust, to a woman who has lived all over the world, to a woman who could not depend on any constant, the waves, the grass, the fire, these are constant. These are rooting. These are home to her in a way that nowhere else has been. 

And I am asking her to leave it. For me. I am asking her to relocate her life again, to come and live with me in my condo that is still near the lake but not near this beach. I am asking her to uproot, to leave her first constant home. I am asking her to make a new home. I am asking her to trust me. I am not unaware of what this means, and so I have been studying. 

I have been watching the fire, crackling and warm, and I have learned to hold her a certain way when she is cold. I have been watching the waves, and I have learned to be consistent and unrelenting in the way that I try to reach further than I am able, will ever be able, knowing that it’s the reaching that counts. I have learned the sand, to be firm and supportive, but able to change and be flexible to meet the ever-changing shapes of life that are pressed into us, and I have watched the stars and have learned to believe in things neither of us fully understand, to believe that the universe has a purpose for us and that we are charting the right path through the cosmos. She has told me before, when embracing, that I feel like home, and as we begin to pack up and leave the beach, our fire covered by sand, those words are in my mind. I feel like home. I am counting on it.