The whales and dolphins appeared off the shore of Asbury
Park during after Thanksgiving trip, not in the same place near the pole on the
sand where she danced for her mother, down beach, in Ocean Grove, a block away
from the Majestic.
And I felt the same way I had back in 2012 when I saw them
off the shores of Cape May, but most acutely last year – as if their location
so close to places I associated with her, I could not help but feel her spirit
lingering in the waves.
After several years of posting old journal entries, such
coincidences strike me particularly hard, stirring up old emotions I previously
though dead and buried.
This year we did not stay overnight and so did not hear the
banging and moaning from the other room at the motel the way I did during the Cape
May trip a decade ago, although seeing the fins of the dolphins and my later
stroll passed the Majestic brought out the same old ache, and visions of
lovemaking I often had about her.
You can’t stroll through the past and not get tainted by it,
the old magic spells still lingering in my brain and body, making me react in
memory how I did back then nearer to the fiery core.
I could almost still feel the heat of that summer long ago, picturing
her in her large sunglasses and short sun dress, standing in the lobby of our
office, getting ready for long weekend she would take over that Fourth of July,
to this place.
While the temperature this year forced me to bundle up
against the chill, the old heat still rubbed me on the inside, the same sense
of lose (and intense jealousy), I felt back then.
I thought about the dolphins, whales and my reaction the
whole ride home, again struck by the ironies and my reluctance to let it all
go, to keep this special thing, perhaps the last spark of what might have been
something once, a sunken treasure that rises out of the ways periodically, when
I least expect.
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