Peter says, “I can’t sleep in this relentless surf.”
“You’re the one who loves ritual and repetition.”
“Ritual, yes. But this pounding is relentless.”
We are sitting on the screened porch of our friend Fita’s beach house, Alligator Point near Tallahassee, watching the sun slide down from cirrus to cirrus in a blaze of lavender, hot pink, and citron yellow. For fifteen years Peter and I were members of a group that came here for sun and fishing, long before we ever thought of being a couple.
“Why does the surf keep you awake?”
He says, “There was a trip with __” (his first wife) “early on. We were poor and the bungalow had no AC, so we had to keep the windows open all night. That’s when I realized how endless it is, how relentless.”
“I remember sitting in this exact same spot when you were getting divorced. You complained you had always thought the two of you would spend your golden years this way, watching the sunset at the beach, and I thought: I could do that with you.”
“You making that up?”
“No. Remember, earlier, that weekend at Cape San Blas, when I was unattached and had to sleep with a gaggle of teenage girls in sleeping bags?”
He says, “That was the weekend Melissa brought her lesbian friend, and Rachel’s mom pretended she wasn’t flustered by their sleeping in the same room.”
“Remember the day we walked down the beach and you carved a heart in the ramada?”
“We were vandals.”
“We were love-sick.”
He says, “Listen to that surf.”
He says, “Remember the time we went to Ray and Lissie’s beach house—I think Anne was five-and you got mad because I fell asleep with her at nap time?”
“Sure. We were all stressed out that weekend. It was the first time you made her sit in the back seat, and she screamed until we got to McDonald’s.”
“Remember when we rented Pelican Roost and Tim came down with Jewel; and John brought whoever he was dating then?”
“It was Tim’s twenty-seventh birthday, I remember because I was twenty-seven when he was born, and we made a big deal of that.”.
“Remember when he brought the pogo stick for Anne’s birthday?”
“Yes, but that was before, at the Buccaneer Inn.”
“Remember at the Buccaneer when Molly jumped off the balcony?”
“Yeah—remember? —there was a motorcycle convention that weekend, and Rachel and Anne flirted with a redhead in the pool.”
So we come back to the Gulf and the memories return.
We come back, relentless, to this paradisical stretch of beach. Jerry is gone, of cancer. Peter’s best friend is aphasiac from a stroke. Ernie is blind, his son Alex dead of a river accident in Mexico, Anne of a car accident in Georgia, Tim of suicide. The rest of us are scattered, but we come back separately and sometimes together, to the pounding surf.
He says, “It makes you think of The Eternal Recurrence.”
“I don’t really know what that means.”
“It’s Nietzsche’s fourth doctrine.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Okay. The First Doctrine is that God is Dead.”
“Okay.”
“Second: Therefore man is responsible for making his own value system. I’m simplifying, you understand.”
“Of course.”
“Third Doctrine: The Will to Power. We want more than reproduction; we want Dominance.
“Fourth: If the universe is infinite and matter finite, then eventually every combination of molecules will happen in the same way again, you and me sitting on the beach while the sun goes down, remembering …”
“Except science no longer thinks the universe is infinite.”
“No. Look how high the tide came last night.”
I remember years earlier, sitting in this exact spot alone, looking up to the sea oats and suddenly feeling myself absorbed into the sand and sea, a molecule of creation, at one with the world.
“Remember the time…?”
So we come back here, the surf pounds, relentless, and memories of here rush in, crest, tumble over, foam, recede, repeat.
___
Janet Burroway is the author of poems, plays, essays, children’s books, a memoir and nine novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of NYTBR), and Simone in Pieces, due out Sept. 2025. Her Writing Fiction is now in a tenth edition, Imaginative Writing in its fifth. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University and winner of the Florida Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award.