LONELY ROBERT - A STORY





The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, 
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, 
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, 
but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles 
exploding like spiders across the stars. 
Jack Kerouac. On the Road


A little wave of blue and white and turquoise came rolling over the flat part of the beach. The blue and the white and the turquoise came rolling without rushing. It was a gentle colour bash from the open sea.

Robert sat on his surfboard, looking down on his hands. There were fresh cuts on both of them. No matter what side he turned them there was always another thin red line. They were what he called war injuries that burnt when they touched the soft salt water to his left and his right, so he let them fall to his sides just because it was too much effort to keep them up. The burning sensation reminded him of something he had forgotten while he was sleeping on the beach. When he watched the sea coming in, slowly increasing its pull at his legs and hands and wounds, it seemed to him that the answer was somewhere out there. It was the same longing for truth, for the essence of life that brought him out here every single day for the last two months.

A girl, you might say, is not the best reason for battling against strong waves, sometimes losing yourself in the water’s inferno, sometimes riding the waves so high you suffer from vertigo because you can barely make out the white and the dark blue and the depth beneath you. A girl, you might say, should not be the reason for risking one’s life but for keeping the one life you are born with. You will not get another one, not another shot. You will not get it back, mumbling, head-shaking, heart-broken. Robert eased himself into the pain that spread from his hands. As if the stabbing pain equalled his inner grief, as if he could prove that, after all, it did not hurt too much. Just a little burning, here and there, and from his heart circles of pain billowed away again and again, like the echoing waves of a stone thrown into calm water, until the circles met the pain from his hands somewhere near his shoulders. A gentle wind cooled his skin. The more he concentrated on this coolness, the more it burnt and burnt and burnt.

The beach was a deserted little patch on the Portuguese coast. No one had changed the patterns on the sand for weeks now and only Robert’s surfboard and feet left the occasional print on the soft surface. The tourists would come soon and Robert would not be able to battle over his touched paradise, would not be able to fight, to lose and to lose again.
Paradise had found them as they were travelling South: an unexpected turn of the road, a missing sign or the lack of attention. Whatever it was that had brought them to the loneliest of beaches, there they were. It had been something between winter, spring, spring and winter and the waves had still been crashing against the stones that were barely visible beneath the foamy wildness of the sea.

They were young, they were in love, so they had forgotten to spend one thought on how easy it actually was to stay alive.
It was a warm, soft-cushioned paradise, after all.

The big waves had not scared them, they had been playing with them, teasing them to come closer, to touch their feet, ankles and thighs, their bellies, their breasts, their shoulders. Robert and the girl had been catching one another in the water, turning and dancing with the high and low tide until their skins had been covered in baby wrinkles. So young was their luck and their love, that it had been very rare for them to pause, to stop, to think. The waves had dictated their life rhythm, their rhythm, their love. When they had been making love on the part of the sand that lay a little further down the beach, moist and warm and cooling, all at the same time, all they had been able to hear were the sounds of the rolling waves, drawing away, lapsing into silence, coming closer, getting louder, and the pulsating gasps of lust and surrender mingled with the sheer joy to have found this little sandy paradise.

Their brains swept from one ecstatic being into another when a strange silence caught up with them and the biggest wave they had ever seen smashed what had meant the world to one of them. The biggest wave they had ever seen; the biggest wave that had ever been.

She had been crouching in front of him, looking at him, past him, her eyes wide and scared. Sicktothestomachscared, so scared, he had not been able to look away, strangely disconnected. His gaze had been fixed on hers, while his hands had been feeling for the nearest rock behind her, half embracing her, half trying not to touch her scared skin. There had been an uneven spot in the stone around which he could tighten his fingers, for a chance of surviving this. Her eyes a mirror of the bluest deadly force one could ever imagine. She had held on to him, fingernails clawing into his skin, into his thighs, hands, neck, blood, thin red lines appearing on his skin. Her bones had seemed to deform under the weight of her anxiety and there was only one thing to do.

He had said goodbye. And let her go.

Robert stood up, tucked the surfboard between his arm and his body and strode into the water.

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