On a roaring post-storm winter beach, my partner and I played a pair of clumsy oystercatchers. When the waves receded, we scrambled down to grab dripping fistfuls of stone; when the foam rushed back in, we tripped over ourselves sprinting for dry sand. We hoped to find fossilized shark teeth. Instead, we got a few good laughs and lots of seawater in our shoes.
Abbie took my hand and we walked up 30 feet higher, just below the dunes. There, icy gusts scalded us with sand. We kept our eyes down to protect them. Again we were looking for jagged black teeth; this time, we found dead fish the sea had vomited up at the peak of the storm.
A few sea robins, and bits of crab carapace.
A finger-length, brown-and-white seahorse, ringed with delicate frills, its skin nearly
transparent in death.
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I didn’t fully appreciate our late-winter weekend at the beach until months later. At the time, I spent too much energy on annoyance—not at her, but at the gusts, at beach traffic, at a million small things I can’t remember now.
I don’t want our relationship to go the way of that trip. I don’t want to let it pass on and begin to shrink, a small and pleasant set of associations, eroding with the shores of my memory as the days crash and swirl. If we don’t stay together all our lives—and I hope we do—I want to remember her generosity and the way she smiles while poking fun at me, the curve of her nose and that humor, so crisp most people can’t tell whether she loves or hates them. (When she reads this, she’ll make that sly you-are-one-weird-asshole grin.)
“Enjoy what you have before it’s gone” is a cliche only because humans can’t do it. We constantly remind ourselves because we constantly fail.
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Back at our rental, Abbie and I did some research. The internet taught us that lined seahorses live along the Atlantic Coast of North and Central America, as far down as Venezuela. They hide in the weeds all their lives, often just beyond the surf, and eat animals tiny enough to fit through their flute-thin snouts.
They are not often seen by humans. On video, their movements look slow and deliberate, even timid; yet they navigate the back and forth of waves and tide with alien grace. Every morning, a seahorse dances with its partner, as if each lover worries that the other may have forgotten in the night.
I took a picture of the one we found and showed it to a few friends and family members. Some hated to see a seahorse dead. Others were delighted to learn that these animals live right there, in Delaware—that maybe every day, someone, somewhere, swims alongside a creature so delicately marvelous without knowing a thing.