...Remember when I visited you during that one summer, in California? Mother forced me to go, because she was convinced you were in some sort of “slump”; but I didn’t believe it...

We spent all our time down by the ocean—it was my first time on a nudist beach. I felt so out of place, always hunched over on the sand in my one piece suit, scrawny ensemble pasted with sunscreen, reading my ‘adult’ Nancy Drew. Even then, I felt like the most normal one there—everybody else acted in strange manners; seemed so lucid in reverie, wandering the shoreline. Each time someone walked past me, I caught a glimpse of their long, tan legs, observing the ironic absent-minded way of their strides, their obvious comfortability in the environment, yet sense of awry ladenness, like they had given their consciousness and power to a disparate control.

Even you were different when we were at the beach, and acted just like the rest of them. Immediately after we’d arrive, you’d strip and disappear into the water, and it would be hours until I saw you again. Most days you’d tell me to go home alone, so you could spend the night, and you weren’t the only one. There was such a major transfixion to the beach, and I never understood. When the end of the summer approached, I realized the empty distance that had become our relationship and started to believe what Mom had warned me about.

On the first day of November was when we received the news. We drove up the following day, to the beach; see you for the last time. Bodies scattered the site—the familiar bodies of the ones whom I had observed during my summer. The once alluring contours of their bodies were now congealed in the sand, slowly becoming a part of the shore, aghast looks on faces as if to signify that what has happened was just what they were afraid of.

That night, I walked down to the beach, to observe, like I had during the summer, and realized how, in the prolonged duration of my stay, I had never stepped foot into the water. I knew very well that it was shared perspectives amongst the group that the ardency of the water was what attracted them in the first place—and I had not made much in efforts to understand this nudist passion.

Slowly approaching, began my inundation into the water. It was within that first step, that I had my awakening and understood the aura that emitted from the water of the nudist beach.

I saw myself as one of many waves, and when I knew I’d become one of the ocean’s slaves—I just stayed.