Red Room Where the Writers Are

Huntington Beach was thick with fog, gray and slow with fog. A cool breeze off the roaring sea blew mist into my face, filled my lungs with a wet air not found in the white and humming space of my office at work. It was a remarkable morning in that it was a morning experienced somewhere else. I could see it on the faces of the people that walked along the shore or out under the thrumming black poles of the pier -- it was a morning like any other to them. Were they to rise on the cracked flat fields of Texas and suck in a lungful of dry air, they'd perhaps feel that a dull morning in Texas was a different thing altogether, something rare even, but the moments that one rises to every day are not moments that are recognized as full of potential. We fail as humans, I think, when we open our eyes onto another banal day.

Surfers clad in black skinsuits haul yellow and blue boards into the sea. They run across the wet sand, their ragged prints filling quickly with ocean. Some surfers leap into the water, others wade. Both types angle into the rushing waves. The wind is timid and the waves small. I allow myself to think that what they are doing is easy. It's the same thought I entertain while watching sports on television. Underneath that thought is the knowledge that I'm doughy and full of wobble, that the sea mocks me with its vital surging, but the morning is new and the day is different because place has risen about me in a novel formation. Perhaps place is merely a measure of our ability to discern the emergent newness of all things. The eye that freshly gazes elevates the objects and moments of quotidian life to something beyond ordinary. The eye that fails suffers yesterday.

The surfers, both those wading and those leaping, are spat back onto the shore exactly the same. Such is life. The foaming water is frigid. This is the rise of fall and the retreat of summer. The chill has driven many people away. Only tourists and die-hard surfers remain. Birds peck in the sand. My daughter chases them, shrieking with glee. One bird pulls a cigarette butt from the sand and flies away.

My son wants me to play in the water with him. I am no longer fast enough to ward off the chill. I tell him no and disappointment slumps his shoulders. I firm my resolve because I do not want to be miserable the rest of the day, because I want to sit alone on the sand and scribble in my journal in this half-hour of relaxation before my wife returns from her walk. The baby is content to crawl around and chase birds, fling sand.

I often think that I've been writing the wrong way. I finish a story and it feels false. A bird watches me write this down in my notebook. I imagine him telling me to listen to my own damn voice, that I really do know what it is, what it sounds like, what I want to say. The bird cocks its head. It wants to know what I'm afraid of. I'm not certain I have an answer for it. Perhaps it's the pressure of writing plot or worrying about structure. Perhaps it's the workshopping, all the disparate voices saying many different things. If I discount the adolescent scribbling I did so long ago, I've been working at writing now for seven months. Seven months! Hardly any time at all. I'm not sure why I feel so rushed.

Waves slap against the shore.

I feel an increasing need to drink, so perhaps I'm getting closer. Ha! I think the Indie Lit scene in which I've been reading has just confused me. The twenty-something world is not my world, even though I lack certain types of maturity. I'm not sure that a person can ever become fully mature or that there is even a definition for such a thing. Great writers of the past have acted in incredibly immature ways. It's easy to take solace in that, to lump yourself into that group. That's dangerous. I had all the confidence in my youth, when I didn't need it, when I needed to listen to others. Now that I'm older, I listen to others all the time, even those I shouldn't listen to, because I have little confidence. Or perhaps it's that confidence surges and retreats like the waves against the shore. Just now a wave swallowed a surfer. I see first his yellow board pop up, then his wet head and laughing face. He's not serious about his endeavor, it seems. Or perhaps he is serious, but he's just able to approach his problems in a casual way. He walks out of the water, the board slung under his arm. He's thin and muscular. Perhaps that's it. Confidence often rises from the bone and sinew of our deep body.

Waves slap against the shore.

I huff against the mist blowing into my face. Damn the waves. Damn the roaring swell. Damn the sea. I'll breach the cold and wet distance between. You damn well bet your ass I can frolic. Watch me. The bird hops away from me, startled by my motion. That's right, I tell the bird. You watch out. Fog thickens around me. My daughter digs her small hands into the sand, holding them up for me to see. My son is on his belly in the shallow part of the sea, watching a wave dwindle into him. My wife becomes distinct from the fog, slowly making her way back to us. The sea constantly roars. Sea mist blows into me, reminds me of my moist edge. I think that I'll run out into the surf with my son, leap fast and certain into the water -- damn the cold! -- and I shall swim out till my arms burn red with heat and the water smokes off my skin as I rail against the sea's infinite blather. Here's my chance to run into the loud waves. A wave swells, froths at the tip. The wave grows and grows till it tips over itself and spills into the spreading flat of the sea to slap weakly against my son's chest. It spends its pitiful last motion into the sand as foam and retreats into the dark body that birthed it. My bare feet have sunk into the sand. My wife arrives and gives me a kiss on the cheek. Still, I stand and watch the waves taunt me.