I got in the Gulf tonight shortly before sunset, the light doing that thing it does where the water turns the color of something you can’t quite name, gold sliding into rose sliding into the gray as the day is closing out. I’d spent the afternoon at the cancer center with my neighbor. Treatment. A different kind of light in that building, all fluorescent and fixed, no seasons in it at all.
Most days I live in the fast lane like everyone else, somewhere to be, some sense of forward motion. My neighbor lived there too, until he didn’t. Illness doesn’t ask permission before it takes the exit for you. One day you’re driving with everyone else and the next you’re pulled onto the shoulder, watching traffic go by at a speed you no longer have access to.
Driving him home, I felt something I couldn’t name yet. Like standing on a bridge that isn’t quite the mainland on either side, suspended over water, a strange sense of in-between. That feeling followed me to the sunset – it does that too, slows you down whether you were ready for it or not. Tonight I needed it.
My neighbor used to swim too. Before the diagnosis, he had a whole retirement mapped out in Punta del Este, Uruguay. A house near the water. Years he could see clearly enough to plan around. Cancer took that plan apart. He can’t get in the water right now. No salt water on his skin. No sunset from the sandbar. His seasons have been interrupted in a way mine haven’t, not yet, at least not today.
I didn’t say any of this to him in the car. We talked about other things. But I’ve been carrying it since, and by the time I hit the water tonight it had turned into something pensive. So, I dove under, came up salty, and let the sunset do its thing.
I floated longer than I meant to. Not swimming, just drifting. The Gulf fills me with gratitude, mindful of my mortality – finite, like the sunset, beautifully ending each day.
Out there, life feels short in the best way. A pelican folded its wings and dropped straight into the water 20 feet off, gone and back up with a fish before I’d finished the thought I was having.
I dove down again, swimming around the bottom looking for white-bleached sand dollars. Nothing out there lasts, and somehow that’s the whole reason it’s worth loving. I surfaced smiling for no good reason I could name.
The sun always sets. Fast lane becomes shoulder. Health becomes treatment. Ordinary Tuesdays become the ones you wish you’d noticed while you were still speeding past them.
But tonight, simple light on flat, calm water. Nothing to fix, nothing to figure out. Just salt on my skin and a sky doing the one thing it does better than anything else, going out gloriously.
Get salty while the season allows it. Some evenings, that alone is the prayer.
