A Mirage At Moody Beach

A divine offering

There was a line in a book I'm reading that stood out to me today: ...mirage and reality merge in love. The message is profound, and aptly phrased. It reminded me of the magic love can make, and also that making love can be magic and, often, magic can make love. But mirage and magic are not the same; mirages can take the shape of deadly delusions, dangerous self-deceits and denials. The oh-so-yearned-for, and often much needed oasis, is sometimes, only the dried out and collapsed ruins of castles made of sand.

But, not always.

When there is a true marriage of mirage and reality, when the world is alight with possibility and magic, there is love. There's a story that comes to mind on this topic, one I'm not sure I've ever told here; it was few years ago, when I lived in New York. I was dating a girl at the time, named Georgia, one of the deepest loves I've ever known, and I had booked us a cozy little beach cottage up in Maine, to celebrate our anniversary. It happened to land on 4th of July weekend, and we planned on driving up from Maryland, where we were staying at the time with her parents, all the way up to Moody Beach. We took turns driving her dad's Prius up the eastern coast, The Black Keys blaring from the car-stereo as the wind pulled the sound out through the open windows in soft curtains.

When we arrived we marveled at the tiny little cottage - the size of a closet - and toured the beach and surrounding area. We got high on some jolly green and rode an old kind of trolley aimlessly through the dream-town toward some scenic coastal trail where we walked and watched the sun set. We wandered circuitously back to our closet, unfolded the Murphy bed, and had some sweet cottage coitus. When we woke we captured some fresh Maine lobster, which she would later boil alive for me, as an offering of love, and we spent the morning on the town. In the afternoon, she cooked our captive crustacean to blushing red perfection and paired it with pasta, asparagus, and white wine. To this day it's the best lobster ever to be murdered for my consumption.

I remember at some point a salty tear from the tip of my penis made its way into her eye and we laughed as it cried. Let me not stain the memory with such talk, though.

As for my anniversary gift, I revealed a magic potion, transmuted by ancient alchemy and desiccated, broken down into small powdery pills of MDMA. We washed them down with some wine and went out to play in the late afternoon sun. We danced in the sand and dabbled in the waves; hugged and kissed and watched the sun get swallowed by the sea. We wrapped ourselves in blankets, waved goodbye to the glowing red dusk while listening to Cat Power and Iron & Wine, and we watched the fireworks erupt over the ocean. The colors streamed and raced and burst above our heads with loud crashes, hisses, and bangs. Our hearts gushed.

Small grains of sand rolled past like little tumbleweed blown on an ocean breeze. The crashing waves whispered infinity and we stared at the stars as they crystalized and turned to ice. They rained down on us, twinkling and blue, as though knocked loose from that dark ceiling by some invisible celestial waltzing. The sea cast shades out on the sand, spilled shadows quickly took shape, and stride. We saw phantoms fluttering by; lifelike cookie-cutter humans cut out of fog, strutting past and losing form like thinning clouds. One of them, a translucent woman in Victorian garb, appeared on my periphery and walked from left to right, across us, while I watched Georgia's eyes follow her until she had dispersed and dissolved into a fading memory.

With slack jaws and eyes as full as moons we asked each other the question without saying a word.