The Tenth

I found her alone on the beach, just sitting there staring off into space. Literally. She was sitting on a slight raise and smoking. I was walking alone up the beach and had seen her from quite a way back. I had been watching her. She was pretty, not your insanely hot plastic Hollywood pretty, but an earthly beauty that seemed to come from within. She had long blonde dreads that had all sorts of beads and shells attached to them. As I got closer I could see she was smoking and she turned her head towards me, offering me a smile then some of her smoke. In return I gave her one of my smiles, I hoped it said thank you, and sat down next to her taking the lit smoke from her long gentle fingers. I took a puff and closed my eyes, ‘hi’ I said as I exhaled. A plume of grey blue smoke lifting into the air, it seemed to hang around, joining the smoke in that still evening air; as she passed back her own greeting in a light easy voice that seemed to settle into the cloud of wafting smoke. I took another drag and passed the smoke back to her and leaning back I asked her why she was sitting on her own at the end of a beach. In her soft gentle voice she explained that she was often to be found sitting alone, usually on a beach, but if there was no beach then in a park, under a tree. Somewhere she could have something earthly beneath her as she contemplated.

Staring into the sky and getting more relaxed as time ticked over I thought this through. It made sense, to have that connection to something earthly while you consider everything around you. Grounding your thoughts with the knowledge that you are where you are and would rather be nowhere else. So I asked her what she had been contemplating. She smiled, lay back beside me and passed the smoke before she begun. ‘Life, the cosmos. Why we’re here, underneath this empty expanse, locked in among these trees, buildings, people. Even why I’m in this place at this time.’ Then she turned and looked at me ‘why you run into who you run into, where you do. There are many things, and they don’t really fit together, but at the same time there is no other way that they could fit.’ ‘Ah, the mysteries of life.’ I let it slide out of me, gently slipping down until it settled in the hollow between us, staking it’s claim as an unknown.

We sat for a while and just watched the stars starting to show through, lost in our own thoughts. There were only a few at first, random scatters of silvery brightness in a fast darkening sky. Some clung to the edges of a sky that was red with the setting sun. Whisps of cloud showed up the red of the setting sun and the sky darkened as it stretched out from the horizon. I don’t know about her thoughts, but mine followed the sky. We lay like this for a long time. As the darkness grew so did the shining points of light. Little diamonds sparkling in the night sky, with the soft breeze coming off the sea we were content. At that point in time it didn’t matter what was going on outside our little sphere; everything was fine, and we lost ourselves together and alone in that one moment.