Beach Logs
Sitting on a rotten wood log in the woods along the beach is not my idea of a Saturday well spent. The cold, damp mist hanging low from the fog clouds enveloped around the warm cigarette smoke which left our lungs through our mouths. In the distance, the sound of the Atlantic water crashing upon the beaches, bringing with them collections of straw gathered from the wetlands, and old fishing piers smashed to pieces in a late summer storm.
“It feels like we do this every day, man. How long we’ve been doing this for?”
I took a drag from my Newport, and exhaled, as I looked to the sky for an answer.
“Well, we haven’t been doing this for too long. It was only a short while ago that all we did was hang out in your treehouse and play manhaunt. ”
“That was a while ago dude.”
“Ya, 92 I guess. Remember that? Just before we built the treehouse, we carved the names in that tree in your yard.”
“We use to chill there for maaad long. Didn’t we each have a branch?”
“Yep, and we had our initials on our branches, and then we had the ones of all the members of the group on the trunk, just as you step past the first niche.”
He inhaled some of the dank smoke. “Yeah, that shit was great. I mean, back then I didn’t think all this shit would be going down. We’re the only three kids left that havent been fucked up some how? Teej is in jail, Ronnie’s pregnant, and with Mario’s kid. Mario is shooting heroin somewhere, Kathy’s blowing him, and lil Drew is robbing delis. ”
Lissy chimes in.
“And what the fuck are we? Kris, you aint graduated high school, and you don’t have no fucking job. Jay, you fucking spent all that time in school, and now all you do is sit on the beach and write in that fuckin’ notebook, smoking this shit.”
Anne inhaled from the blunt.
“And me? I don’t have a license, and I get laid off from every job I get. What the fuck makes us this great chosen three?”
I quickly tried to mellow the situation.
“Baby, honey, look, that’s not what we meant. We’re just trying to state the complexity that exists in real life, rather than the simplicity of our youths. And sometimes, you know, it’s ok to wish for those days to return.
“When we were kids, babe, we had it all, and we didn’t even know it. It was our ideas, our visions, that coulda changed the world, and yet we sat there blind to everything else. We let those days slip away. We have to remind ourselves that we can’t let anything slip away from us again. ”
I took my last couple drags from the blunt, which had reached roach level. I licked my finger, and put out the ember on the tip. Anne stood there, with her head tilted, just kinda dumbfounded and such. Murdazz had already begun spitting rhymes to himself as he sat upon the wood log.
I lifted my cigarette to my mouth, and took a drag, as I turned my head toward the small spot of blue that hung over the horizon as I looked toward the ocean. For a moment in time, hope seemed possible, and I became determined to ensure that the sunny day ahead gets taken full advantage of.
