A House on the Beach

A pair of sophomores, polo batting against his knees and skirt against hers, drag their intoxicated bodies to the O’Connell Center and pull on its door. Carston Galilei, sitting on a stool, shouts. Spooked, they run before one trips. Like every other visitor, they don’t know why he sits out here so late.

Here’s why:

Some time ago, maybe a year but almost a lifetime, Galilei sat in the sandy breeze of Newport Beach, a girl who went by Mindy, braiding his hair.

This was an experiment. For when he left Orlando, he didn’t know what California held. He only knew she was there. 

They lived joyfully, freely. She, working at a surf shop, and he, a mainstay in the last row of his afternoon UC Irvine lecture, all to make his daily run to the beach 19 steps shorter.

He sat on the sixth stool of the shop’s bar while she finished her shifts. With few customers, she’d play with his surfers’ frow, recounting the 19 years they didn’t know each other this way.

It was love. Pure. Unabashed. 

So they planned. They’d buy a house down the road in Laguna. No one knew where the money would come from, each hoping to transform their STEM degrees into surfing careers. But they could sleep on the beach until it came, they reasoned.

He kept a drawing of their shack in his sand-packed phone case. It was ocean blue, the color of Mindy’s eyes, those sparkling diamonds he traveled the country to see. 

It made the classes, the distance, the money mean something.

So when she got sick, it all meant nothing. Their savings flowed without a cure. The classes grew less tenable. The distance they once endured, reintroduced in a different form. She could barely speak, and she left without a word.

He didn’t want to be in this distant land anymore, and he returned home, enrolling at another school, without another dream.

So he took a job working a midnight shift as an arena guard. The youthful couple who stroll by see a straight-faced student, little older than them. A man they won’t remember beyond a faint morning tale. 

But he remembers it all, both them and “us.” And if they knew to ask, he’d take out his phone and show them the house on the beach. It’s lost its color, and they can only look at it. 

He won’t let it go.

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