The concrete was still warm from the day when I sat down.
The seawall ran long and low along the water, and I found a place near the middle of it, where the moon laid a pale road across the sea and the waves came in soft, patient sets. Salt hung in the air. Every so often, spray drifted up and settled on my arms, light as breath. Somewhere down the beach, someone was playing music from a phone, tinny and far away, the kind of song you half recognize and never name.
I hadn’t planned to stop. But the water asked me to, so I did.
They came from the sand side, three of them, boards under their arms and towels slung over their shoulders. Sun-bleached hair, still damp. Wet footprints trailing behind them on the concrete. One of them had wax caught under his nails, pale and crumbling, the kind you stop noticing after a while. They were laughing at something between themselves, easy and unhurried, the way you laugh when the night is long and nothing is required of you yet.
They settled a little way down from me, close enough to share the view.
“Good sets tonight,” one of them said, half to me, half to the water.
“Looks like it,” I said, though I wouldn’t know. “You been out already?”
“All day.” A grin. “Might go again.”
We talked in the small way strangers do. They were finishing school soon. This summer, they told me, was theirs; the last one before things got serious. Before the world started asking questions.
“So what’s the plan after?” I asked. The adult question. The one we can’t help but ask.
The one with the wax-stained hands shrugged. Looked out at the moonlit water.
“Surf,” he said.
That was all. No caveat, no nervous laugh, no and then figure it out later. Just the word, offered plainly, the way you’d state your own name.
I didn’t argue. I wanted to, at first, the reflex is in me now, the urge to remind them of rent and careers and the long arithmetic of adulthood. But I swallowed it. Because who was I to hand them the weight I’ve been carrying? They already knew it was coming. They’d simply decided not to pick it up yet.
Inside, quietly, I applauded them.
I thought about how much of growing up is learning to over-explain your wonder. To justify it. To dress up a simple love (for the sea, for a song, for slowing time) in the language of practicality until it’s respectable enough to say out loud. Somewhere along the way, “I just want this” stops being an answer.
They hadn’t learned that yet. Or maybe they’d learned it and refused it.
I sat with the thought that the world might be gentler if we let people follow the thing that pulls at them, without punishing them for it. If “surf” could be a whole life, and not just a summer we’re allowed before the real one begins.
The three of them drifted off eventually, back toward the sand, boards catching the moonlight.
I stayed a while longer. Watched the pale road on the water break apart and reassemble with each set. Listened to the hush between the waves.
Surf.
It kept returning, that one small word, like the tide, pulling back, then coming in again.
I let it.