“We shall never learn the affinities of beauty; for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious history of man.” Robert Louis Stevenson.
There is a place on Pawleys Island, SC that I think is only mine. From that place I watch the setting sun – not as it crosses the ocean horizon as it does in the gulf – but as it burns the sky blood red over the salt marsh. It is quiet and best when the tide is high and the marsh is full and smooth, interrupted only by the occasional splash of a silver fish breaking through the surface into an easy arc.
I hold my breath in those moments and will time to stop. I do that because even standing in the middle of the very reality, with the sounds and smells and salt all around me, I am missing it already. I know full well that I cannot take it in...not really. It is too much, too beautiful, too good. And while it restores me some, it always, always leave me aching because there is something beyond the red sky, beyond the quiet, that I know is there...but that I cannot have as my own. It lies too deep, too far back.
So this moment will leave me as suddenly as it came, and as I make my way back to the people I love I will carry with me only a faded, imperfect memory of what it really was.
Damn if that’s not frustrating.
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