We came down the isthmus as a family, never as anything else, I suppose. It’s one trip of many to connect us, but later we would find out that it wouldn’t do the job...which is a shame, but what can you do, _________ is __________, no amount of family outings can change that.

This would be our last family beach trip. But I was on the beach then, in a straw hat and sunglasses, reading and writing as my water-resistant speckled freckled pup slept by my side in a canopy’s shade. ‘Terns and sandpipers trotted along the spreading edges of the ocean’: the line isn’t great, but it’s something. It’s something I wrote. It’s descriptive. It was the present experience. It was the small mites scattered on the face of an old god sinking down into an abyss for us, a puddle for them.

It was a marker of me in a time before I had any distinction of what I was separate from who I was, in the past, in the family unit. To exist outside of something as myself when I took care of everyone but myself was (and sometimes is) as foreign as the Hoi Toid English on Mid-Atlantic ears. That line isn’t great, but it’s something.

Oliver Nelson crooned us through the actual village of Hatteras where tiny family graveyards in overgrown patches hide away in five sproutings at a time in random areas across the place half hidden in sea oats, half hidden in sand: behind a realty business, in between beach homes and a crab shack, next to the bait and tackle, by the library, sprouting by the fire department.

I wanted to steal an aloe leaf the size of my being, a beach god’s small toenail, that sprouted in front of a local’s salmon candy colored one story, Hockney-would-be-inspired home. I wrote something of that ilk down as well to preserve the memory. Hydrangeas and cypress around each local’s corners...

The isthmus is a divider of chaos and calm, of rampant ocean and a shallow calm. Bob Dylan and dunes of sea oats, the eyelashes of the hilled lids. We never journeyed to the shallow Pea Island regions where grandmothers sit in lawn chairs yards away from dry land and watch their small kin with flailing kites. We have only barricaded ourselves forward, pushing against the god’s yawns/swallows/breaths. I wanted to feel the prehistoric force...I thought that as I spread my arms out to glide into the crests only to temporarily be consumed, then spat back out to the terns and sandpipers, to the family that would do the same the deeper I pushed into them, wanting a different kind of integral force.

You may forget an exact spot along the shoreline, isthmus divide or something else, but I don’t think it forgets you. It’s “blank” so it can carry the feeling, the memory, long after many events have passed and small details and moments creep their way into the nautilus of your ear canals and seep into the crevices of your mind, lost to thought, but not to the place.