Santa Monica

You said to remember the ocean. You said all you have to do is remember it and everything’s okay again. Well, I tried that and it just makes me sad because I’m not there anymore, and it’s not the ocean anyway, it’s you, and me, and here and there. Not even there in particular, mainly you. Okay, just you.

Anyway, I’ve been to the seaside a million times before, all sorts of exotic ones – where people in uniforms come and sweep the sand, where you can snap your fingers and a comfortable chair is whisked over to you, or an unlikely looking cocktail, with odd plastic things in it, and little umbrellas, and once even lit sparklers.

The beach we were on was pretty nice, I must admit, and odd, because it wasn’t very hot, I mean the sun didn’t shine all the time, but curiously, the sand was warm and so it didn’t really matter about the sun. You just took your shoes off and it was lovely. We didn’t have swimming stuff, or towels, or anything. We just took our shoes off and lay down on the sand, together, and sometimes we dozed, and sometimes we talked, and you told me about growing up in Paris, and how you remember playing in bomb sites in London when you moved there, and all the bad things you did when you were a child, and I said I liked looking up at the walls in Paris, past the glossy shop fronts, higher than that – how you could often see shell marks, from the war, how easy they were to miss, and you said your Dad was good at things like that, knowing what had happened and where, and how he used to take you to ordinary looking places and bring the past back to life, telling you about members of the resistance who were shot on that street corner and so on.

There’s none of that in shiny happy California. Only smiling laughing people. It was quite extraordinary how happy they all looked, and that isn’t as bad as it sounds, or as I’d imagined it would be. In Santa Monica they ride bicycles everywhere. Not head down trying to avoid buses, like here, but with their long hair flying out behind them – they all have long hair and it’s always shiny. And they all wear yoga clothes, and they look thin and healthy, like people in advertisements.

It was a bit of a pain having to stand on the pavement when we wanted a cigarette, but it wasn’t such a big deal, and when we wanted to smoke other things, the bathrooms all had very good extractor fans. I like the way you put coolaid in the meth pipe to make it look like a lava lamp without the floating bits. Meth is very over-rated though, I can’t think why you got a habit.

People weren’t so shiny in Ventura, but they still looked happy, especially the men we saw with matted hair and weatherbeaten faces. You said they were surfers who’d arrived years before and fallen in love with the ocean and never left. They do just enough to get by – and the rest of their time is spent riding the waves, it’s all they want in life. They looked a little bit like those old photographs of pre-revolutionary Russian mystics. I forget what they're called; same hair, same bare feet, same sandals.

You said; “look at how empty it is here – look, there’s no-one. How crowded this would be in France – anywhere in Europe. That’s why I like it here”. It was nice. I haven’t been to one of those crowded beaches for years but I do know what you mean. That wasn’t the part I’ll remember though. It wasn’t the bit that mattered most to me. That was lying next to you. Finally feeling like I belonged somewhere, after all this long time – nearly thirty years. It wasn’t the same – like we aren’t the same – it would be odd if we were, but the feeling was the same, that belonging that I only ever felt with you and Joe, and it was a million times better than that too, because we’re real people now, we’ve grown up, and learned to let down our defences with each other.

So anyway, that’s why I miss you now, and it all feels flat because I am still a bit jetlagged, and not very well, and I will go to the doctor tomorrow if I’m still sick, and tell him about that bug going around in Nevada, where you live, like you suggested. Especially now you’ve told me it can’t be the twelve straight days of heroin. That’s not long enough. You said it was more likely to be the lack of sleep, or a bug. Mainly though I think it’s you.