Found

I sat on the rocky cliff, staring out at the surf as it crashed on the rock. Sea foam leapt onto the pink granite, dissolving into a glossy sheen, only to be replaced by the next wave. The process was mesmerizing. Wave after wave, unstoppable, keeping time in a slow and steady rhythm. I felt my breathing slow to match the rhythm of the waves.

All around me the world stretched out, smothering me in its vastness. The air was rich with scents, each inhale planting a memory in my mind. The salt in the air brought with it a memory of a boy jumping across the rocks below, only six or seven years old, completely out of breath but unable to resist the promise of new discoveries. The texture of the rock reminded me of a day several years later, when we sat there talking about our first crushes, planning how we might put our arms over their shoulders at the movies and maybe even get our first kiss if we were lucky. Out of the scent of the pine grew the memory of Paul telling me he was dropping out of college to travel the world and hear stories from as many people as he could.

A fog began to roll in from the sea, obscuring the horizon so that it was impossible to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. A small pine tree jutted impossibly out of the rock nearby, not a grain of soil nearby. Further up the coast I could see the tops of the granite cliffs poking out of the fog like the prow of a ship forging into the unknown. The heavy moisture hugged the sea as it approached, covering the waves one by one. Eventually, if it weren’t for the now muffled rhythm of the waves on the rocks it would be impossible to tell I was anywhere on the coast.

“Hey Mike.”

I sprung to my feet, sending a few rocks tumbling towards the invisible sea below. I scrambled to catch my balance, but it felt almost as if the fog reached out to pull me back from the abyss.

“Woah buddy, be careful on those rocks there. You’re usually more sure-footed than that.”

I whirled around, most definitely not being as careful as I should have been on those rocks. I knew that voice – I would recognize it anywhere.

“Paul?”

“Yea, hey man.” A wave crashed below. “Been a bit.”

I squinted into the fog, still trying to identify where the voice was coming from. After a few seconds I noticed the tree to my left, the branches just barely visible whenever the wind blew the fog a certain way. As I watched the outstretched limbs float in the grayness they started looking less like branches and more like arms. I watched as the arms turned into a jacket-clad torso, and the trunk emerged first as one leg and then another. Finally a face appeared, fog pulling back from the ears, wind whipping curly hair across the forehead.

I stared, stunned, mouth agape, as Paul shot a cheeky smile in my direction.

“What… the actual… fuck.” I really had a way of coming up with profound language at the flip of a hat.

“Good to see you too,” Paul chuckled as he walked forwards, looking at home as ever on the rocks. When he reached my spot he wrapped me in a big bear hug, squeezing the reality of his presence into my bones. Tentatively putting one arm around him, then another, I could feel the fog sticking to his rain jacket.

I took a step back, holding onto his shoulders and looking him up and down.

“How is this possible? How are you here?”

“Huh, hell if I know,” he said looking around. “You tell me, bud. This is your whole thing.”

“What do you mean, my whole thing?”

“You’re the one that came back here, sullenly looking out at the fog and shit. This is clearly a moment for you! And now I’m here? You think this is about me? Come on.”

“Of course I came back here! You told me, you said ‘Mike if I ever die, I want you to come back here and remember all the shit we’ve gotten up to.’”

“Yea, I told you that like fifteen years ago. We were twelve, Mike! I also told you I wanted you to pants Tracy Adams at her locker, but I sure as hell hope you’re not thinking of doing that next. And look at this jacket.” He looked down at the blue Marmot, pinching the material by his shoulders with both his hands. “This is the one you got me for my birthday last year. Real humble of you to dress me up in it.”

“You always got a goddamn answer for everything, don’t you.” I pushed him gently back and he snorted and rolled his eyes. It was all coming back so easily - the teasing, the jokes, the laughter. It all felt so real.

“So you’re telling me I’m imagining this then? You think I miss you that much?”

“Well, yes, obviously. I always told Amanda I was your first love. But are you imagining this? I don’t know. Probably. Maybe. I would say that it doesn’t really matter. I’m here, you’re here, we’re talking. It’s as real as you want it to be.”

I looked out at where the sea should be, the view still a swirling mass of grays. I must really be losing it. Amanda was going to be concerned about this one for sure. My daydreaming always bothered her, but this was in a league of its own.

Paul, or the figment of my imagination that was Paul, sat down on a ledge in the rocks with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slightly hunched against the wind and the fog. He gazed out into the fog with a curiously content look on his face.

“I could sit here all day. Somehow, even when you can’t see anything at all, this place is still beautiful.”

I took a few steps back in Paul's direction and took my spot on the ledge next to him. Staring out into the grayness I tried to look through the swirls and the eddies to find whatever distant point was capturing his gaze so intently. After a few seconds of fruitlessly seeing nothing but fog I looked down at my feet and pushed the loose dirt around.

“I don’t get it,” I finally said.

“What?” Paul still looked out into the fog. “Oh, I thought we just went over this. I’m a piece of underdone potato or something. Don’t overthink it.”

“No, not that. I don’t get what I’m supposed to do.”

Paul finally pulled his gaze away from whatever he was looking at and placed it on me, running a hand through his fog-dampened curls. Enough years of conversations allowed me to see the question in his eyes.

“I mean, sorry to be harsh, but I know you're dead. I get that. I gave your eulogy. Your mom cried into my shoulder at the cemetery, just like I cried into Amanda's shoulder the morning I heard. I wept for you like a brother. For a week, life stopped. And yet it all felt so… so good. So real. Like for a week, what I thought was life stopped, and what I realized life really was had actually started. Like I was finally seeing past the curtains and understanding what it meant to feel something real. To connect with something deeper and grander. Something purer.”

His eyes remained patient, fixed on me with the same curiosity he’d given to the fog.

“But now - now things just feel the same. It’s back to work, back to the same old anxieties and routines. Back to my apartment, my dog, my wonderful wife. Back to everything the same. Except for the fact that whenever I think of you, there’s an ache. Whenever I reach for my phone to text you something funny I saw, there’s a pause. Whenever somebody asks me how I’m doing and I say I’m fine, there’s a lie. So everything’s the same, except me. I’m different. Something about me has changed and I don’t know how I fit in. Where I fit in. Or what I’m supposed to do to make all of this feel like it wasn’t just some blip in a sea of sameness.”

I stopped and realized I had to catch my breath. I relaxed my grip on the ledge and let my shoulders fall back into place.

“I just, I thought that once this was all over I would have something to show for it, you know? Something about my life would be different that made all the pain worth it. Some marker, clearly delineating the time before you died, and the time after.” I looked down at my shoes again. 

“I hoped that all of a sudden I would be doing all the things you always had the courage to do. Maybe I’d travel the world with Amanda, or finally try writing that book I’m always talking about. I don’t know... like I would finally get out of my own way, in your honor. For that one brief week, when I felt like I really saw life, everything made sense. It all seemed so tangible. But now… I don’t know. Everything’s back to normal and I feel like a failure. Like I failed you.”

I looked back up at Paul, and saw his eyes had changed. His brow was slightly furrowed, and a drop of water was running down his cheek. He reached up to give his nose a quick swipe and sniffed. His gaze returned to the fog for a moment again, the waves continuing their rhythmic dance with the rocks.

“You sound lost,” Paul said in between waves. “Lost and disappointed.”

“Yea, I guess if you wanted to sum up everything I just said into two words, those would be good ones.” Paul ignored me.

“I always loved this spot. There’s something about it that lets you lose yourself, something that lets you forget yourself.” Paul glanced over at me. “Remember when we would get lost in the woods on purpose? Just to see if we could find our way out? I’ll never forget that one time we found the waterfall with the swimming hole. God, that was a perfect day.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the memory. “That was a perfect day wasn’t it. We were so fearless back then, how did we do it?”

“That’s what you’ve forgotten, Mike. You used to know that being lost isn’t a bad thing. It’s an adventure. It’s the best way to discover something new… something beautiful! That fear you carry with you now? It’s getting in your way. You need to stop thinking so damn much, and start feeling. Start living again.”

“Not sure I’m ready to take advice about living from a dead guy yet…”

“Joke all you want, but you know it’s true. That week after I died, when you said you felt so alive - do you know why that is?”

I looked straight ahead into the fog.

“Because you let go of yourself. You forgot all the different iterations of what could happen, and how it might make you uncomfortable or how it fit into your idea of yourself and your life. You were so far out of your comfort zone that you finally released yourself. You let yourself get lost, stopped living the life you expected to live, and let yourself live the life that really was.”

For the first time, I noticed the shapes of the fog. Storm clouds in miniature, dancing through the air. Billowing dark gray ribbons curled in on themselves while iridescent lighter gray blooms expanded miraculously. Flowing in between were more shades of gray than I ever knew existed. I floated there, amidst the swirling watercolors, seeing the fog itself for the first time.

“I just don’t know how to get back to that spot, Paul. I want to tap into it again, trust me.”

“Just let yourself wander. Be ok with being lost. Stop trying to see through it, and instead just let yourself look at it. There’s more beauty there than you can imagine.”

“That’s fucking scary.”

“Well, that’s probably how you know it’s the right thing to do.”

We sat there together, looking out at the fog. I felt the camaraderie of being with an old friend, like a years-old sweater that fits loosely and comfortably, all the rough spots exactly where they should be and the soft spots sitting right there next to them. He was right, I realized. I was a dreamer, but I was never a doer. So much time was spent charting the way ahead that I forgot to take that first step into it, to trust the unknown. Who needs therapy when you have hallucinations?

“Good eulogy by the way.”

“Oh get off it,” I snorted. “This is some fucked up mental gymnastics of self-affirmation at this point.”

“And you know you’re not a failure. I see right through your self-pity, Mike. I’m beyond proud of you, man. Just go out there and trust your gut, take a leap of faith. Find that waterfall in the woods, close your eyes, and just jump in. Remember what it feels like to find yourself when you’re lost.”

I put my arm around his shoulders.

“I am really going to miss you, Paul. You have no idea.”

He smiled at me and shrugged. “I’m not going anywhere, you just need to find a new way to talk to me.”

And so we sat there, letting the silence say the rest. The fog churned around us and the waves crashed below us.

Eventually, the air started to grow lighter and warmer. The shades of gray went from thousands, to hundreds, to eventually just one. The sea stretched its arms towards the sky, and the waves grew louder again as they threw themselves without hesitation towards the rock. I savored the sounds and the smells, and appreciated the bedrock grounding me. My arm dropped back to the rock and I felt the cool hard crystals of the granite beneath my fingers.

Standing up, I took one last look at the pine tree growing proudly, seemingly trying to peer over the cliff at what was below. The branches blew gently back and forth as a fresh sea breeze spread itself out on the coast. Turning, I walked back towards the woods, appreciating for the first time that I had no idea where I was going.