Winter in Santa Barbara

We spent that winter trying to find beauty. In the morning, we'd place green tinted glasses of water on the table and wait for the light to come in the window and illuminate it like Orthodox art, or make rainbows on the surface. We had decided that winter that we were going to live off art, off words, rather than the prosaic and unrelenting requests of our the shallow vessels we call bodies. We were determined to follow in the footsteps of art, the painter Renoir said, "The pain passes--but the beauty remains."

On weekends we'd travel to the coast, admire steep hillsides draped in yellow sunflowers that plunged to the turquoise water below. We'd marvel at the rakish hair of the sage, the old costal live oaks, roots growing from shale, trunks silvered, bent but not broken by the wind. In the evenings we'd drive up dark roads, slithering up the mountains until we reached remote places. There, we'd climb on granite rocks and sit with our legs crossed, listening to the Santa Ana winds melting the white alders and Manzanitas, mimickign the sound of the ocean that we'd left behind.

We'd walk through cemeteries veiled in early morning fog, run our fingers across the rough names of the dead. We'd marvel at the light on stained glass in old churches, the white bellies of gulls against pale blue sky. At dusk we'd sit with the graves behind us, on a small sea cliff, the voices of the dead but memories of lives misspent. Below us, the ocean, beating its same old tune, always on message, at our backs, the dusky arms of fig tree, slivered by light. We drank beauty in as easily as if it were water.

We left behind, for those few somber months, all the things that we'd failed to be: good lovers, good friends, hard workers, the children our parents had dreamt that we'd be. Our dreams were no longer rimmed like an old cup with regret. We remembered fondly those who had loved us. We imagined the fingers of our mothers, our lovers, pulling softly through our hair; a child' rake across the sand. We forgot the places we'd left behind, and didn't bother imagining the places we'd be. We were here, or there, in a cobble stone courtyard with artists drawing pictures of children in bright colored chalk, in the balconies at ballets, on cold walls at midnight, admiring the shape and pull of the moon.

Towards the end of that season, we saw humpback whales near sunrise, their bodies, like gargantuan brass dressers we had left behind in the houses of our youth, slipping through the water like rain through the sky. It was that morning, my body chilled by the sea, with those leviathans playing some indecipherable game at our feet, that I remember acutely from that lovely and bizarre winter. It's the last clear memory I have of you, standing next to me on sandstone cliffs, bare foot and windblown, looking out across that steely water as if we were explorers bound for some new valley. It is not the precise image of that morning that I remember so well that my heart briefly leaps, even now, years later. No. It is the reflection of that morning through your eyes. Just look at them! Look! They are on fire. Only beauty remains.