at the beach.

Three years ago, I parked my car at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown and stared out over the water. I was taking my lunch break. I was writing in a notebook. It was February. At that time, things in my life had taken a sharp turn. A plan had been shattered. Trust had been broken hard. Everything felt, in a word, bleak.

I sat at the steering wheel of my parked car. I gripped the wheel, shivered a bit, let the sound of waves fill my head. I remember looking out over the expanse of the bay and thinking, The ocean and the sky are the same color. I don’t know why, but it felt very profound. It was everything I felt. Life was covered with a thick gray blanket.

The ocean always has a way of pushing my thoughts out of my brain, in whatever form they’ll take. Something about the waves, something about repetition, something about the rhythm of introspection. Maybe this is why I couldn’t really be a writer until I came to know the ocean. And sometimes it is bleak. Sometimes it’s stormy. But peace doesn’t come from feeling peaceful, it comes from feeling everything as each thing passes.

This past weekend, I drove out to the Cape for a day. I just had such a craving. I needed to be hit in the face with salt air. I needed to see the familiar things that trigger the home feeling inside of me. Saturday morning, I picked up a croissant at the Boulangerie and drove to White Crest Beach. I parked and sat in my car. The sun was very bright and the wind was blowing hard. I saw a handful of whales surface - just the spouts blending with rolling waves. I wrote there for two hours in my notebook. Sand was pelting the windows of my car and it was rocking a bit in the gusts of wind. I wrote until it hurt my hand to grip the pen. I mean, I was gripping it hard. I drank an espresso out of a Dixie cup.

Someone told me recently that my writing style is heart-aching. I haven’t been able to stop thinking of it since. I realize I have a specific way of observing and experiencing the world that is colored by depth of emotion. The emotions are very distinct, very powerful. And so I guess it’s true. When I write, I’m drawn to the things of life and mind that might make a heart ache. Those seem like the stories worth telling. Anyway, it’s not because my heart is bleeding - it’s because I want to make your heart bleed. I want you, the reader, to feel. I want my words on the page to fill you up with emotion that you might not understand, that perhaps you can’t even explain. I think that’s good.

Last week, I came into work half an hour early one day and sat in Starbucks to write. It felt right. The break in routine, the change of scenery, the early morning calm - it triggered some paths in my brain that had been shut down. Or that I had forgotten. It reminded me to make new time and to find new places to write. Write standing up. Write in the cold. Sit in a corner of a room in your house that you’ve never sat in before. Experience and place inform the way we write. Take advantage. There are unlimited places to write and people to see. That’s all you need. Take it. Drive to the beach. Park the car. Grip your pen hard.