creation returned to creation.

It had to be 5 AM. It was the second night in a row that I'd been up that late. My body had stopped protesting for the most part after I'd bribed it with a Jack and Coke and a couple of leftover potatoes. "You can stay up," it told me, "but only for a little while longer."

We were all walking toward the beach. As our feet hit sand, we hit a problem. There was a five foot drop from where we stood, straight down to the sand below. Big storms had hit recently, and the ocean had reached up the shore and taken a big bite out of the coastline, leaving its ragged teeth marks behind. Getting down wasn't the problem, it was the getting back up. But that was a problem for later, and thinking about future issues wasn't really in style with this group. Just go with the flow and we'll figure that out later.

I rolled up my pants to my shins, but the third or fourth wave caught me up to my knees. That first soaking was freedom, though, because you don't worry about getting wet when you're already there. I stood there, alone and away from the group for hours. Or minutes. I thought about the beach, and how I didn't really like it. But that was unfair, because I liked this beach. Empty of people, I could hear only the ocean. I could only see the whitecaps, as the rest of it faded into the night. I thought about how the ocean was always like this, and I just hadn't noticed it before. It was comforting in its constancy, the water being pulled in and pushed back out, like deep breaths.

My peace was palpable. I wondered what makes us feel at home in places we've never been. We had been to see a speaker a couple of weeks back, who talked about visiting a primeval forest and feeling strangely as if he had been there before, as if his evolutionary ancestors wakened inside him at the sight and smell of the place. He called it genetic memory. I don't think I buy that. I feel connected, but not through whoever came before me. It is me, myself. I am not connected because someone long before me came from this place. It is because I am made of the same stuff. It's ashes to ashes, dust to dust while I'm still alive. Creation returning to creation.

Josh came up behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder, testing the waters of my mood. Before the potatoes, I hadn't been as friendly as I might have been. We stood there awhile, breathing in and with the ocean.

My attention had drifted to the stars. They were beautiful, and yet the light pollution from the beach city behind us carried enough to make the sky a hazy dark gray. I missed the view at my parents' house in the mountains, where the deep blue was framed by the deep green of the trees, or the night in Kansas, where the sky was impossibly big and the Milky Way was something you could see instead of something you read about in Science class. One bright star shone at me, tiny and clear. I considered making a wish. Then I realized the star was moving. Josh started to pull away.

"The question is, do we tell our kids how to recognize satellites in the sky?" I asked, knowing I could capture and keep his attention with a good conversation. "It's always disappointing to me when I realize that the really bright and shiny star is a satellite."

"Disappointing?"

"Yeah. Because there's a star, and it's really bright and seems so close. But then I realize that it's moving and it's just something we put up there. It's just a big hunk of metal, like I see every day. It's not special at all."

"I think it's amazing, a testament to our ingenuity. Look how far we've gone, and think how far we can still go." I guess that's supposed to capture my imagination the way it does his, but really, it just makes me feel alone.

We wandered back up the beach and scrambled up the recently formed cliff of sand. A couple of people were sitting on a bench. Already filthy, I sat on the sand next to them. As a group, we had been rambunctious and loud, running on alcohol and lack of sleep. But it was quiet now as we slowly came in from the beach back up to the overlook that separated the real world from the ocean.

"So I guess we know the answer," I said.

"To what?"

"Whether the ocean is louder than Big Mike. I can't hear him." Mike was a big man and a loud man, and you could chart how late it was based on the volume of his voice. But the familiar sound of him arguing about something, anything, whatever was not there.

Josh leaned forward to look at Mike's still form sitting on the bench. "He's asleep."

I pulled up the hood of my hoodie and laid back into the sand. Those relaxation tapes that sound like the ocean were a good idea, but no competition to this. I thought about taking a nap and whether I could convince Josh to keep guard and shoo the crabs away from my face. But I wasn't really worried about the crabs. Surely they would recognize me.