Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once look’d on you,
For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.
Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,
Return in peace to the ocean my love,
I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated,
Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!
But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,
As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;
Be not impatient – a little space – know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land,
Every day at sundown for your dear sake, my love.
Walt Whitman
The Pacific comes in like a brutal, gorgeous noise, each wave a three chord progression of salt and oblivion, and those headlands rise up like amplifiers stacked against the sky, blasting nothing but wind and wild grass and the stubborn truth that you’re small and temporary and that’s okay, maybe even beautiful.
Whitman knew something about this kind of longing, this oceanside reckoning with the fact that everything you love is already slipping away. The light hits those volcanic rocks, yeah, volcanic, the whole beach is made of apocalypse debris, and for maybe twenty minutes the world gets painted in amber and blood orange, and you stand there like some idiot pilgrim who traveled however many miles just to witness the earth showing off before it all goes dark.
Heartbreak? Hell, the whole place is heartbreak. It’s built into the geology. Every sunset here is a reminder that beauty doesn’t stick around, that the best moments are the ones dissolving even as you’re living them. The bunkers scattered across the headlands from some forgotten war, the way the fog rolls in like regret, it all whispers the same thing: nothing lasts, everything matters.
You come here after someone leaves, or before, or during, the timing doesn’t matter. You come because the Pacific has been swallowing light and spitting out darkness for longer than your pain has existed, and somehow that’s comforting. The ocean doesn’t care about your _______ or your _______. It just keeps hammering the shore with the same relentless rhythm, turning mountains into sand, turning your small catastrophes into what they really are: just another drop in that rolling, infinite crowd.