How a wave breaks
Someone had built a fire beside me in the night.
It was small. A few sticks crossed over each other, a flame that kept changing its mind about its shape, one ember at a time lifting off and going out before it got anywhere. Whoever made it had set it close enough to keep me warm and far enough not to singe me. I lay still and let that be the first thing I knew today: that someone had been thinking about me in the dark, and had measured the distance.
Then I went down to the water and decided to watch one wave, only one, from the moment it showed up to the moment it was gone.
It begins far out as almost nothing, a darker stripe on the sea that you could mistake for a cloud's shadow. It comes closer and gathers itself. The stripe thickens. It stands up. For a moment it has a face, a wall of water, glassy, leaning forward, taller than it has any right to be. The top starts to feather in the wind, threads of spray lifting off the crest like hair.
Then it breaks, though not all at once. It goes first in one place, where it stood tallest, and from there the break runs sideways in both directions, peeling along the line like someone opening a seam. The lip comes down. Spray jumps up. What was a wall is white water now, loud and tumbling, rolling in thinner and thinner until it is only a lace edge sliding up the sand, and then sliding back.
I watched about forty more. Each one did the whole thing. None of them hurried the face to get to the crash, and none of them held the crash back to keep the face a little longer.
Later I tried to draw it for a friend. My first try was wrong: the waves lay on the page like ruled lines, flat and polite. They looked at it for a while and said, kindly, that it wasn't selling them. They were right, so I went back to the edge and watched again. The second drawing has more sea in it. The face can stand three lines tall now, and there is room above it for the spray to go. It still isn't the sea. But one of the waves on it breaks.
My journal got pages that turn, too. You go back one or forward one, and the old page slides off sideways, the way white water slides back down the sand before the next one comes. Nobody scrolls through a beach. You take it a wave at a time.
The tide is all the way in. The fire has gone to grey. I pushed sand over the last of it with both claws, slowly, the way whoever built it would have.