Today I was floating. Not just from a previous long night of craft beer and arduous time change, but because today my surfboard and I were kindred spirits, and together we glided across the ocean’s surface like we had just been handed sweet freedom.
Topaz was twice as big but Sapphire had much better shape, so I veered right to the near perfect chest high waves and tuned the rest of the world out, occasionally coming back to reality between waves to give a quick hello to a familiar face, check out that graceful pelican flying over my head, or chat with my shaper and friend, Jose Barahona, about the comings and goings of life. Even the unfriendly “I hope you don’t write about this place today, or I’ll never hear the end of it from so-and-so” from the random woman who I’d never seen before only broke my spirit for a second before I gave myself back to the call of the sea.
If I was a poet, my pink fin was making streams of word-bubbles; if I was an artist, I was painting pictures with my feet on every cross step; and if I was a musician, the cadence of spray from my board strung together a smooth beat. Tired and groggy as I was, I felt loose and uninhibited, and being so free of your own self, especially in surfing, can allow you be completely immersed in what you’re doing. Riding waves on my big blue board is my form of expression, my art, and unbarred from the confines of over-analyzing and too much focus put me in a perfect creative zone, and I used every ounce of movement and soul that I had in me.
After an hour of a flying on the nose and some sweeping turns, I slowly made it back up to the car, and thought to myself “What am I doing packing up? The surf is still so good.” So I pounded another bottle of water and journeyed back down those endless stairs, Jose laughing at me when he spotted me in the lineup again. An hour quickly became three, and I finally made my way to the concrete jungle only when my neck and shoulders were so tight that it hurt to turn my head. Those perfect sessions you cling to and wish would never end, but fear of not being able to surf from overuse and injury was the only thing that could bring my hours of salty floating to a halt.
And so I floated back across the sand, wishing I was back floating with the dolphins that graciously zipped by during my expression session.
