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. --