Page 34 of The Surfer

12

COVE

The wind whipsthrough my wavy hair as I look out across the beach and at the early morning sun. The concrete steps leading down from the parking lot and into the sand are cold and rough on my feet. The white sand below beckons me; it wants me to step down on it, feel it.

But I’m frozen to the spot with trepidation.

The beach. I’m here.

I’m back.

It has been a long time since I’ve last set foot on sand, a whole year since that accident at Oceania Surf Competition. I haven’t felt the sand since, I haven’t been on a beach since. I’ve missed it.

But I don’t deserve to be here.

I flick my blonde hair back and squint towards the ocean. The sun’s rising and I can just make out the early morning surfers bobbing up and down on the waves in the distance.

I wish I were out there again, tasting the salt in my mouth, feeling the cold water splash against my wetsuit, feel the touch of a surfboard again.

That would be perfect.

But I don’t deserve to.

I failed a year ago.

I fucked up.

I don’t deserve the feel of the ocean.

I’m not meant to be back on a beach during sunrise with a board under my arm, I don’t deserve it. I’m supposed to be back in bed.

I’m at the beach before that American girl’s even here. She’ll be surprised by that. She thinks that I’m just some lazy stoner dude, but I’m used to waking up early to catch the first wave from when I’m a kid. An early morning trip to the beach is as natural to me as breathing, it’s just that I haven’t done it in a year.

A whole year of avoiding this place. Avoiding who I am.

Everything in my life came crashing down because of my screw up at that surf competition a year ago. The supermodel girlfriend I had left me by a text unceremoniously, my Dad hates me, and my sister thinks I’m a joke, and now they’d sent in some geeky American girl as a last-ditch attempt to get me back to my old ways. Now that’s a joke.

Don’t they see that I’m nothing but a worthless failure?

Well, this latest attempt will prove to them I really am a fuck up.

I don’t deserve their help, and I wish they will just leave me alone and just let me smoke and screw chicks all day, living off my inheritance. I’m nothing but a screwup, so let me live like one.

Can’t they all just forget about me and my “potential”? That’s what I’ve done.

That American girl, no matter how cute she’s, thinks that she can control me. No one can control me. I can’t even control myself. I couldn’t even control that surfboard at that surf competition.

I’m nothing but a failure.

I flick back my hair again.

It is good to be back on the beach, though.

I look back down at the beach and reach out with my foot. It makes contact with the warm sand.

Home.

A shiver goes up my body as memories flood back. All those childhood lessons. All the times I will full-on dash into the cold ocean water with my surfboard in my hands, eager to feel the waves on my body and taste the saltwater in my young mouth. The smell of hot sun cream. Everything about the beach reminds me of good times and makes me happy.

And then I remember the accident; the falling from the surfboard in front of everyone, the massive wave that crashed into me like a wall of bricks, being unconscious and having to be pulled out the water by the lifeguards. Sitting in that hospital bed for weeks as I recovered from surgery. The two long scars on my legs. The look on my Dad and sister’s faces as they sadly stood around my hospital bed staring at my broken body. And, most of all, that feeling of failure, that feeling that I fucked up everything that fateful day and how I can never go back to the way things were.

Both of my feet are on the sand.

Here I am.

I’m standing on the beach for the first time in a year.

And it feels good.

I turn back around to look at the car park behind me. I can make out someone coming towards me, strolling down the hill towards the steps into the beach.

It’s her. The same girl who thinks she can change me, shape me back to who I was. The girl with sass, who thinks she can defy me. The girl who’s actually kinda cute.

That cocky little preppy American girl.

She’s here.

Ripley fucking Sailor.