This is an intimate place. I wish that I would have come here before. Had I known about it, I’m sure I would have. It’s 3:30 in the morning. Balboa is completely still and without a sound of its own at this time of the morning. I stepped out of the company car, two blocks from the pavilion and the only sound on the streets is the sound of me walking to and from the company building. I drove down the street to a small park off the beach. Over the sound of the sprinklers is the roar of the waves. I’m hoping that the sprinklers will end soon so that it will just be me and the waves. This is a very small intimate place.

The stillness of the morning, the power of the waves, the mantle of the embracing darkness—one can be alone with ones thoughts in a place like this. But it’s not a lonely kind of aloneness, but rather a kind of communal aloneness. It is the kind of aloneness that one shares with that special other.

I guess I had forgotten how sensual the beach can be. On a morning like this it isn’t the brazen sexuality displayed by dozens of nubile female buttocks in g-string bathing suits, but rather it’s the cozy sensuality of a warm terry-cloth robe and a hug and sleepy-eyed happy-faced kisses. God, I’m going to have to get a place by the ocean some day so that I can enjoy this experience more than once a year.

Finally, after a half hour the sprinklers finally gave up the ghost. Now it’s just me and the waves and the hum of this laptop and the distant sound of someone’s fucking car alarm going off. Actually, the car alarm is pretty faint. That might be the sound of the street lamps and associated electrical generators (the sound is that faint). The ocean, the beach, the waves, back in the days before I had a private place of my own to go to I would have to resort to the beach to get away from everyone to be with my honey.

One of the first times that I went out with Colleen was when we spent the day together at Laguna Beach. This was the summer after I had graduated from high school. I was never very fond of being pounded on by the crashing waves, so I was never too much in demand as the he-man on the beach. But then I never thought of myself as being there to be seen, but rather to see. And see I did. Colleen, at the time, was someone rather pleasing to gaze upon. This was ages ago, before office-worker spread and the births of three children added just a bit to her “lateral stability.” I’ve certainly gone from the skinny kid to something much… rounder. Ah, those were the days.

I think I fell in love with her smile first. She had a wide, seductive closed mouth smile that had a one and sometimes a two-dimple exclamation point. It was merciless that God would have given such a woman such a smile and then add a magnificent singing voice on top of all the rest. When I heard her sing and we had shared the intimacy of our music together I was altogether in love with her for sure. I guess if there was a first love that was based on something other than a circumstantial bit of attention from the opposite sex, that was it. But it was also a kind of tragic unrequited love that never quite established its own personality. It hovered in the unconscious, unfocused reserves that we saved for each other but could never bring to share in the light of day.

On the beach we sat. She got up and strolled down to the water to cool off. I watched and waited. By the end of the day, when I was most certain that I wanted her in ways that I couldn’t have possibly even imagined back then, she walked away from me with little more than a casual wave and a good-bye. Much like my encounter with another high school crush ten-years later, the time with Colleen was for her a brief break before she rejoined a previously established relationship. God, she certainly got under my skin. Even after I went off to college in Los Angeles and she went back to her boyfriend, I wrote songs for her and continually fantasized about the time I unwittingly got her off with a long kiss and a very deep hug. It’s so odd to imagine—her sensuality was utterly overwhelming to me but she was the one woman in my past that I never crossed the sexual threshold beyond the kiss and that hug. She never seemed able or willing to chose me outright. It was my fatal belief that I wouldn’t demand her love or present her with some kind of macho ultimatum. If she wanted me as her boyfriend she would chose me.

But she didn’t that summer on the beach, or two summers later when she and her boyfriend broke up or a year after that when she went off and married someone else.

I gave her the choice to chose me but instead she chose to put me on a pedestal and fondle me from afar. Back in those days she thought I was some kind of super-Christian, the foil to her future husband’s carnal desires. She had me to pray with and bemoan her spiritual failings and Mr. Right to fuck. We were soulmates… that is until I stopped praying, then it all became distant memories and unfulfilled passions. God, I really loved her back then. JBB

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Tags: Joe bustillos short stories, long lost loves, sex and the single brain cell, short stories, the beach

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