Archive-name: Casual/whitsand.txt
Archive-author: Pat O'Brien
Archive-title: Whitesands


Copyright 1993 Pat O'Brien
All permissions reserved except for the right to distribute in
electronic text form across computer networks.


I went to White Sands that Sunday evening.

After our argument I had spent the weekend in a fugue.  An
automaton, I spent hours at the computer..achieving little
but an excellent score on Xhextris.  By Sunday the pain set
in and I had to mobilise or sink into a depression and
emotional agony so vast that I could not contemplate its
ending with any modicum of rationality.

It was 6pm when I set out.  The summer sun still harsh and
bright on the road with the only consolation the traffic
streaming towards me in the opposite lane.  I had thought to
go to Scarborough but the lure of deserted spaces directed
me to the open beach.

White Sands has little to recommend it.  A grey beach, 
sodden to mud at low tide, ineffectual ripples of waves 
sucking desultorily at a shell-less beach.  The
ocean burps rhythmically there...it does not roar with the 
depth required by a broken heart.  It does, though, have a vast 
empty expanse and rocks on which to sit and feel the sharp 
reassurance of being alive...and human.

By 9pm the sun relaxed.  It cast gold anodynes over the sands
and I stood barefoot with the water feinting shyly at my  toes.
The horizon blankly returned my stare and a sharp well of
pain rose in me.  Alone, I allowed the desperate well to fill
and I heard my own deep, vocal pain challenge the North Sea.
It arced harshly over the suddenly frozen swell, a highlighted
gold offence.  

"Shit!"  The voice, alarmed, sounded behind me.

I spun.  A man, ten yards from me stood glaring in horrid 
fascination.  His stance was a parody of a running
man...a thwarted escape and frozen concern.  

Much later I rationalised my movement towards him.  Misdirected 
anger, misplaced love, emotional yearning...a driving to fill 
suddenly empty places.  To his tribute he stayed, braced and took the 
force of my arrival with a sharp expulsion of breath and firm
surrounding arms.   His heart was beating fast...the shock of
the scream still alarming his blood.  Then I sank into him, this 
stranger, with the live pulsing of an intensely loving animal.

We fucked.  I barely remember the shed of clothes...just the
sudden thrill of naked body heat and the vibrant stroke; his 
sliding, shafting of me.  Each leaving an ache and return
a jubilee.  This man filled me with the hundreds of lusts 
echoing in the sea...the brittle reality of grinding sand
and the numb warmth of human knowing.  I craved him and he
completed me...urging my hunger in the cooling embergolds of
the dying sun.  I rose to him and he weighted me...I opened
to him and he entered.  I swole holistic and he prevailed. 
More than that he freed me...

Long after the throb and revel was spent, my senses pulsed.
That Sunday, I passed the mundane...the caught chill moment
of the banal.  I leaped into a strange dimension where all
men and women meet in complicity...the Human.  No man is a
stranger...each an image of those who exist before and
after, no body an `other' but the grouped and massive beat
of the thousands of aching hearts and naked lusts.

Each time I feel the new rejection...the sharp foil, I feel it
shared by everyone, everywhere.  I feel the abandoned child
and the beaten women, the terrified and the starving, the
strange eyes of the unfulfilled.

Each time my blood seeks levels in the afterglow of this screaming
bond it feels the deep swell of human tides...the grit and
aliveness of a pulsing union.

Each time I look for freedom's gate I find it in the electric blue 
blaze of a stranger's eyes and deep gold dusk of White Sands.

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