Back then, Grace liked to be alone sometimes—notlonely, there was a difference—because doing so often meant carving out extra time to write. She’d bring an old composition notebook or journal, a few pens, and her thoughts, then plop down someplace and try to puzzle through whatever thoughts were taking up space in her head. And now here she is, thirty-seven, traversing the same worn path and preparing to do the same thing.
The trail splits. Most visitors veer left toward the main attraction and designated photo spots. Grace veers right instead and follows a narrower, more overgrown path, the one she knows opens up to the jetty. She steps off it, over to the long line of dark rocks that stretch out into the sea like an arm, and picks her way across them, careful not to slip on their slick surfaces. There’s a danger to it—visitors aren’t technically supposed to walk out this far—but it’s a risk that’s always felt worth taking. Once she reaches the last rock, Grace sits, kicks off her sandals, and inspects her heel, newly sore from her long bike ride in flimsy flip-flops. She twists her leg and picks at it, but it’s no use. The skin around it blooms red, not in an urgent or dramatic way, but enough for her to notice.Probably the early signs of an infection, love,she hears Birdie say.If you ignore it, Cece, it’ll only get worse.
She shifts her weight, trying to settle in and figure out what, precisely, to do next. She unscrews her water and pulls her journal and a pen onto her lap. Maybe it’s the silence out here. Or the fact that sitting this far out in the sea has always made Grace feel both full of wonder and also infinitely small. Whatever the reason, she decides to just stare.
In two days, Grace will be thirty-eight. It’s a nothing birthday. Not a new decade or milestone worthy of a special party. It was just supposed to be a day. A nice one, but simple. That’s how she imagined her whole life would feel at this stage, too. Easy. All the questions that once haunted her—Who am I? Where am I going? What do I want? When will I figure things out?—tucked neatly away in her past. And wasn’t that the kicker? The fact that they’d all moved back into her mind, like time had merely been an illusion and the years—the ones that’d felt so long sometimes—had never actually passed.
“Wh-what is that?” Grace suddenly stutters to herself, her sight trained on the water.
Something strange catches her eye. From beneath her dark sunglasses and the shadow of her baseball cap, she squints and tries to interpret the sight. Five—no, six—not-quite-right objects float past. At first, from her elevated spot up on the rocks, she thinks they’re some unusual school of fish, a lesser-known species of bird, or a collection of small, discarded bags.
“Wait.” She strains her neck forward, her whole face scrunched up in a question. “Are those ... papers?”
“Yes,” a voice—one full of drama that Grace instantly recognizes but really wishes she didn’t—announces from behind her. “And that’s exactly where they belong. In the water, where they’ll disintegrate and no one will ever be subjected to reading the awful half attempts at prose written on them.”
Grace turns slowly, not quite wanting to look but aware that—other than catapulting herself into a dangerously deep part of the ocean—there’s no clear path for her to run away.
“Also, you don’t need to remind me,” the late-twentysomething girl who stands a little way back on the jetty states. She holds an oversizebright-pink journal—the wordsBe Calm and Carry On ... with Your Storystamped in bold typography across its front. Without a word, she whips it back open, tears out another sheet, crumples it into a tight ball, and tosses it. “I’m well aware that what I’m doing is bad for the environment.” She flings it. The paper catches in the wind before it touches the water’s surface. “Selfish, I know. But honestly, not to sound terrible, that’s the least of my problems at the moment.”
Instantly, Grace’s heart starts to do backflips, while her palms become coated with sweat. She blinks, as if one of the sheets of torn paper has somehow flown straight into her cornea, inhibiting her ability to clearly see. But of course, just like all her other recent unexplainable encounters on this island, her vision is not the problem.
It’s her.
The wild hair, still golden but pulled up in a messy-yet-trying-too-hard high bun. The designer-distressed jean shorts (which cost her half a month’s rent). The black T-shirt, which for reasons she couldn’t articulate, made her feel a touch edgy. The oversize beaded bib necklace she wore everywhere that year, hoping to look ... what? More stylish? More grown-up? MoreNew York? Just above, her more garish jewelry choice, the glint of gold metal—the nameplate necklace—shines on her chest.
Cece. Ten years earlier. Freshly twenty-seven. Not yet knowing this would be one of her last weeklong visits here, or that the life she’d been pining for—the one that would ultimately crash a few short years later—waits just ahead.
“What are you doing?” Grace asks, pulling her hat down farther to better conceal her face. “Why are you throwing papers in the ocean?”
While she waits for a response, Grace flips through her mental Rolodex of memories in an effort to remember this day. But she can’t. The older you get, the more specific instances from your past begin to dim. It’s like your mind starts to run out of storage and begins to purge files to free up space. Some moments—the big ones—stay. But others, the in-between scenes that unfold in the quieter pockets of our days—words we said, small things we did—fade.
“Dear God, would you stop!” Grace shouts as Cece rips out another page and sacrifices it to the sea. “I don’t remember why—I mean, I don’tunderstandwhy you’re throwing them into the water like that.” A pair of seagulls swoop down, thinking they’ve found an early lunch. After a brief investigation, they fly away, disappointed. “Is this symbolic or—”
“You wouldn’t.” Cece smacks her journal—the one Grace distinctly recalls buying on a visit to the Strand—shut. She slides it into her canvasNew Yorkertote bag, then crouches and takes a seat on the rocks. “That’s part of the problem. No one does.” She sniffles and tries to hide the fact that she’s crying. “Also, lighting them on fire felt too on the nose, you know? Fire. Creative burnout.” She quickly wipes her eyes. “It’s bad enough that my writing feels entirely clichéd. I don’t need the ways I reject it to feel trite, too.” She lifts a hand to her chest. “God, I hate this thing,” she announces, and unhooks her clunky necklace. “It’s so heavy.” Cece holds it out, looking at it from all angles, like she might chuck it into the tides, too.
“Wait!” Grace almost bolts up, but realizes she doesn’t know all the rules of this most uncanny game. (Does she know me? Do I tell her who I am?) “Please don’t throw that!”
Cece raises a well-manicured brow, her tears already drying up. “I’m not.” She drops it in a pile next to her. “Though I probably should. I don’t even like it. I only got it because every girl in my office has one just like it.” She looks at Grace. “Why? Do you like it or something?”
“I don’t mind it.” Grace recalls the time she wasted in that too-big fast-fashion shop in Union Square, deliberating over it. Was it the right color? Would it make her look more stylish or in the know? Was it worth it to pay fifty bucks for a piece of costume jewelry—something that so obviously wasn’t real—especially when she could hardly afford her rent? “It looks like something I might’ve picked out at your age, too.”
A fishing boat cruises through the inlet, its wake causing a ripple of rough water to hit the rocks. The driver waves. Both Grace and Cece—as if on cue—wave back in precisely the same way. Once the boat is out of view, Grace glances over both sunburned shoulders,checking to see if anyone else might be nearby and witnessing this moment.
Unlike her previous encounters—at the beach, the arcade, and the Beachcomber—Grace has been afforded more physical distance this time. For a quiet minute, she watches Cece and allows herself permission to fully recall this time in her life. Not loving where she was living—New York a relentless experiment in claustrophobia. Always weighed down by worry ... Was there enough money in her account? Did she have room on her credit card to go out with friends? Wondering if the right amount of silly accessories—if she wore enough uncomfortable shoes or wrapped herself up in trendy oversize scarves—could ever manage to transform her into the version of herself she’d moved there to be. And yet, beyond all those fears, there lived a quiet, if not somewhat delusional, sense of hope. If she stayed, toughed it out, kept trying and faking and fumbling and picking herself back up, it’d all work out.
“So,” Grace asks, her tone tender for this version of herself who’s trying so hard at everything, “what’s with all the abandoned pages?” She points to the water, though most of them have sunk or floated away. Grace can’t remember having done this, though it seems like exactly the sort of poetic gesture she might have made at that age. “You’re working on something?”
“Trying.” Cece lies back on the rocks. “And failing.” She looks up at the sky. “It’s a book. Or at least, I’d like it to be one day. It’s about a city girl who falls in love with her childhood crush when she bumps into him again at the beach.” She covers her face with her fingers. “Original, I know. It might as well be a Hallmark movie.”
A gull glides overhead, its easy movements as beautiful as a poem.
“I wrote the first draft really fast,” Cece continues. “I’m not even kidding when I say the story poured out of me in a few weeks. That probably should have been my first clue that it was stupid—the fact that it came so easily.” She runs her fingers over the rocks, like she’s looking for something just out of reach. “Anyway, I’ve been trying all morning to brainstorm a more unique spin on an ending. So far, everythingI’ve come up with feels impossibly contrived.” She squints at the sun. “Probably because my heart’s not really in it.”
“That’s the hardest part, isn’t it?” Grace picks up a black pebble, rubs it like a worry stone. “Trying to force the words onto the page when you don’t really feel them.”
Cece rolls onto her side, like a college roommate ready for a gossip session. “Are you a writer or something?”
“I am,” Grace admits. “Or I used to be.” She sets down the stone, picks at a corner of her journal still sitting in her lap. “I’m not sure what I am right now, honestly.”
