I just wrote a whole long thing; then, frustratingly, it wouldn’t PUBLISH. So, here’s an excerpt from “Swamis,” currently and still being edited. This scene is over halfway through the manuscript and takes place in the parking lot at Swamis on a Sunday evening. Let’s see if hitting the ‘Publish” button works this time. And…

“I think that… Joey, I might be in love.  Maybe.”

“I think I might be.  Also.  In love.”

“Might be?”

“Am.  Have been.”  If I didn’t say, ‘Always will be,’ I did think it.  I did believe it.  Then I said it.  “Always will be.”

“Always?” Ginny leaned back into the open door, gave me a look that said both that she believed me and that she might not believe ‘always’ meant ‘forever.’  “You better.”

H …

If any emotion other than love, and in particular, new love, so front-loaded with anticipation, joyous anticipation; had the same all-out, pounding arterial intensity for people not in their teens; the result would have to be a significant increase of sudden strokes and heart attacks.    

This doesn’t make me a romantic.

I do not plan on having a heart attack while surfing, as others have, though this is often glorified in obituaries as ‘doing what he loved.’ If I do have one, it’ll be when I first look out and see irresistible-if-not-perfect waves coming in. Right there, in some parking lot, fumbling for my wetsuit, fumbling with a towel, fumbling, not skipping out on and over the water like a properly thrown skipping stone; just dropping. A different stone. A rock.

And the waves just continuing to roll in.

Maybe this parking lot, but not on this day. It wasn’t about the waves. I was standing, trying to slow my heart rate, trying to control my breathing. It was that portion of dusk when the shadow that is night starts to mix with the overcast, both descending; those few minutes when the inability to see very far in any direction seems to be reassuring. Comforting. Calming.

But it took a while.

A lovestruck eighteen-year-old with a brain overloaded with everything else might just discover he had followed a Jeep over to 101, watched it go north long and far enough to see the right-hand turn signal light up, blink. He might imagine he saw things too far away to be seen. With the world spinning, he might be frozen; thinking, trying to think, images and words tangled, waves crashing into each other.

Waves. Waves are born of chaos. Disorganized. Out of control. Of all the waves hitting all the beaches in all the world, only some are really rideable if rideable means more than just taking off and going straight to the beach. Surfable. Most waves are closeouts. Some, with time and distance, with the proper point of land, or reef, or direction, become rideable. Only a very few are perfect. Even Swamis was only rarely perfect. Perfect.   

My world was chaos. I blinked. I was standing in the middle of the opening to the parking lot, wondering how long I’d been frozen. I had one clear thought: I had to tell Ginny the truth.