Sunburn

Album cover for Yotto's "Erased Dreams," property of Reflections. Image obtained via Spotify.

Note: "Sunburn" is an ambient piece by the producer Yotto. This piece recounts my meditations at Newport State Park a long time ago, back when I was first there to stargaze.

I am on the beach, Newport beach, surrounded by water, trees, lakes, forests, for miles, thinking of you. A song, Sunburn, a wordless ambience, plays in my head, as my heart follows the gradual intonations of its beatless noise. 

I am alone at three in the morning, the stars above me casting shadows on the ground. Six hours away from you, in the middle of nowhere, at a place where you have never been but where you could always go, I am here. I wish you were here.

The waves, crashing into the eroded shoreline at atomically regular intervals, remind me of a time, a brighter time, when we met the lake, only a month ago today. Loud noises, a museum, coffee, miles of talking and more miles of walking, met with the inevitability of diverging pathways. O’ how I miss those days, those summer days!

On a bench near the sea, I feel the benches of our past. Where we sat as we dreamed of college, that mighty hill upon which we could see a city, a large city, twenty-six miles away from our place. The bench we sat on as together we read under the sun, in the hot sun, getting sunburnt as my heart slowly burned in love with you. Two events, two moments, two benches that carved an eternal tattoo in my heart, only a week ago and two months ago today, so close yet so far in the past.

I see a path behind me, a black hole encased in a canopy of trees, and I remember that path, that first path, a hike long ago in a place we do not remember. The dirt path, the small bridge over the river, so distant in our past yet so memorable in my present. A summer lost in the inexorable movement of time, but stored carefully in the precipices of my small heart. Our first moments, so long ago together!

I see everything as I see nothing. The striking stars, a discrete line of haze splitting the sky from horizon to horizon. The faint silhouettes of the trees and the water against the almost completely dark sky, dozens of miles from the nearest light, the nearest people, the nearest home. The solitude, so far from all the artificial things we hate, we despise. The brilliant smell, the lack of the pungent odors of car exhausts and runoff. A natural world, so far displaced from the artificial one; a place we always loved, a place we would always visit.

Never have you been here, but always you have. Nature is our place, and in nature we have lived and grown together.

I am in nature, and I see you. Whenever I am in nature, I see you. My heart is sunburnt, on fire, burning as I hear the ambience of a Sunburn in my head.

I love you, I am in love with you, even though you do not know. I am Shakespeare to the Dark Lady, Venus to Adonis, Romeo to Juliet. I see in the stars your face, your eyes, your thrift clothing, your organization, your passion for people and morality and good food, everything. I hear in the waves the beating of your heart as we hugged goodbye, your beautiful voice, the content of your voice, everything. I feel in the warm air the warmth of your heart, the temperature in that bus as we came home at four in the morning, annoying everyone who was trying to sleep through our loud bombast and our enthusiastic voices. I remember everything, feel everything, as vivid and obvious and painful as a Sunburn.

        I wish you were here. I wish you could have joined me. I wish to join you near where you are now. Only a few months. My heart burns like a Sunburn to see you again.

Please note that this piece is directed at nobody in particular and was merely a freewrite of an experimental style. Although the moments are real and are connected with something, it is not a representation of reality. The meditations at Newport State Park, although accurate, neither confer nor allude to any present emotions.

I thank you all for clicking and reading through the text. Your enamor with my writing invigorates me to the very depths of my soul and poisons my blood with everlasting, continuous torrents of emotion and love.