Before I even opened my eyes, I knew it had happened again.
The signs were all there. I could smell the ocean, hear the waves, taste the ocena salt encrusted on my lip, feel my wet clothing stick to my skin.
And of course, I felt terrible. Like your worst hangover. My head was throbbing with pain and I felt like I had run a marathon while being savagely beaten.
By midgets. With hammers.
I had a taste in my mouth like I had spent a whole day licking envelopes, and enough fluid in my ears to make evrything sound flat and reverberent and tinny. My pores were clogged with seat sealt and slime, and to top it all off, I could feel (and smell) that I had somehow managed to wet myself quite recently.
So there was nothing that opening my eyes could tell me that I didn’t already know. And I knew it would hurt. So I said fuck it, and just lay there on the beach for a while.
But only a while, because as relaxing as it was at first to lay there and put off having to deal with reality for as long as I could, eventually the sun makes the shirt on my back start to itch and I get muscle cramps and worst of all, I start to get bored.
And that’s when I open my eyes, endure the usual agony while my beary eyes adjust to the tropical sunshine, then get up and finish wading to shore.
Time to start my day.
First order of business is to lose the clothes. I note, with passing interest, that this time I appear to be wearing a luridly floral print shirt and mom jeans.
That I could live with. But the neon green gas station flip flops are horrible, and the godawful cheap charm bracelet on my wrist and matching necklace around my neck are crimes against fashion and humanity.
Apparently, whatever forces keep doing this to me thought it would be funny to dress me like a tacky housewife on vacation this time.
But you see, I am a dude in his twenties.
Hence the hilarity.
So off it all goes, and for a short time, I can enjoy the feeling of the warm sun on my nude skin and give my penis and testicles a rare thorough airing.
You learn to treasure the little things.
As I spread my clothes out to dry, I went through the usual routine of gently but firmly turning my mind away from unproductive lines of thought.
For example, I resisted the urge to try to remember where I had been. I knew from long expertence that this would be futile. No matter how hard I tried, my recent memories would remain a feverish mishmash of images and emotions that suggested much but defied all attempts to be put into a coherent narrative .
Maybe I would remember some bits and pieces that made it all make sense eventually. maybe I wouldn’t.
To be honest, I didn’t even care any more. Whoever it was that was awake when these episodes happened, it wasn’t me, and as far as I was concerned, he had his life and I had mine and I didn’t give a fuck what he did.
In fact, I wished it would just leave me alone.
But that was clearly not going to happen.
Another unproductive line of thought : my life before the first time I woke up here.
I remember some thing, although not very clearly. I remember taking a lot of photographs, so maybe I was a photographer. I remember an apartment with big windows. lots of plants, and an orange cat named Gingerbread. I remember selling tje fruits and vegetables my father grew to tourists who visisted our village to see the big stone buildings the Mayans built.
And I remember a lot of sex with men. So I can only assume that I am gay,
But other than that, nothing. So that’s now a person other than me as well. Maybe it’s the same guy who is awake when I am dreaming. Or maybe these interludes on the beach are the dreams and when I go to sleep, he wakes up.
I don’t care. If this life is the dream, then I am a very boring man. I would have to be, to keep having the same pastoral dream over and over again.
Because it’s always this same beach, with its faintly crystalline sands stretching off into infinity in both directions. The same wave free crystal clear ocean perpindicular to the beach. The same blue cloudless skies and the same off-white sun hanging in it.
I don’t know what is in the other direction. And that’s strange, isn’t it? Beaches exist in the space betweren the ocean and the shore. But there’s no shore here. There isn’t anything, not even a blank space or a brick wall.
And when I try to think about what is in that direction, my thoughts slip off the topic like it’s wet glass and I end up back where I started.
Actually looking in that direction is out of the question.
As usual, I wander aimlessly along the beach. It doesn’t matter which direction I go or how long I walk. When I turn back, the place where I set my clothes out to dry and dug my latrine will always be right there, not ten paces away.
What really bothers me about this beach of mine is that there’s no life here. no seagulls, no kelp, no sand fleas, no shells… nothing.
Just sand and sea and water.and sky. It makes me feel like no matter hwo real it all seems, I am really just a bug in some cosmic terrarium and everything I do here is purely for the entertainment of some unimaginably superior beings.
Well I hope they enjoy watching me masturbate, because there’s not a hell of a lot else to do here.
Eventually I start to feel tired and sleepy. At first it’s pleasant but it soon gets so intense that I feel like my limbs weigh a thousand pounds each and like the sand is trying to suck mne down to it like water down a drain.
I resist it for the usual token amount of time, and then I go down again.
Before I even opened my eyes, I knew it had happened again.