I needed that. I needed to approach the edge of the world, to abandon everything behind me, to leave everything that mattered in the sand and walk out into the surf. On that last night, I spent a moment of solitude alone on the beach. Harpoon Harry’s raging behind me, thousands of generation enjoying the meat market that was the drunken bliss distilled in Panama City. I walked out into the ocean, took a final drag from my cigarette, launched it out with a flick of my fingers into the great black gulf until it hit the water and extinguished. How appropriate that gesture: the extinction of the spark. For years, I’d struggled with the knowledge that I’d once had a spark, and had lost it somewhere out there. What a symbolic move: killing that spark with the world screaming behind me, the noise of tens of thousands being slowly supplanted by the rage of the waves and the flood of voices that roared from within. I walked out into the waves without bothering to roll up the legs of my pants, without bothering to care about the couples swapping their own waves of fluid on the beach behind me, thinking only of that limit experience. Merging with the unknown, feeling it caress my skin, enveloping all that I’d given to it. Sound became nothing but heartbeat and voice and voice and
I thought. Of her. Out there.
The future was unwritten, but I was almost there. Accelerating into turns, plummeting into the future with each instant. Somewhere out there…I felt it, the falling, the gravity of our situation. I felt the desire, the need, the utter insignificance of