A Painting, a Girl, and the Beach

March 10th:

I haven’t slept well for the last ten days. Someone told me to write about it. I’m not sure how this will help, maybe getting it down on paper will help me process it, they said. What’s to process, she is dead. Done and over case closed. 

March 17th:

My therapist said that doesn’t count as a journal writing so here's another one. “Describe the event,” she said. Fine, it was a warm sunny day and the birds were flying high above the pier we traveled every friday night. 

There was nothing to show this day may go bad. No storm, no rain, no crows. S-She walked with such grace. Her feet drifted and floated across the small wooden pier as we headed to our spot.

It was the place where we met. On that sunny day no sorrows had been permitted along the beach as the golden rays of the sun and the slow calming crashing of the waves washed your tears away. I saw her sitting sketching the soothing sunset and felt drawn to her. We talked for hours on end and I wished that day would never end, and it didn’t until last week.

Like I said it had been a sunny beautiful day, like the day I met her, but this one would turn a dark sorrowful turn. As I headed down the pier with her we headed back to our spot near the shallow reef. The weather men had predicted a calm soothing evening and she was eager to get some painting done of the sunset.

Neither of us had grown up on the beach. I was a Texas boy born and raised and she hailed from the pearl white mountains of Colorado. Neither of us knew why the water went out suddenly and something called a “bore” formed. Apparently it’s a side effect of a tsunami, I don’t really remember that much I blacked out very quickly. I got lucky my coat apparently got stuck on the bench and held me tether to it when the water went back out.

She wasn’t as lucky. The tide ripped her out into the water and into the nearby reef. They say they looked for her for hours before giving up the search. There that’s the story she drowned and I wasn’t able to save her.

March 24th:

They said they found a girl washed up 500 miles up the coast. She doesn’t remember anything, not her name, her home, anything. I travel up tomorrow to see if it’s her. It must be too good to be true, but they tell me to be optimistic and just give it a chance. We’ll see.

March 25th:

It’s her, it’s really her! They found her! She washed up somehow. They say she must have out to see and been pushed back in miles up the coast. She had major brain damage to her hippocampus or something. Apparently it’s the part that controls recognition memories or something. They said she may regain her memory in time, but there’s no guarantee. I’m just glad to have her back.

March 29th:

It’s been a little harder than I thought as she struggles to remember anything of her old life. Mostly she just lays around and stares out the window at a passing bird or kids playing in the distance. It’s hard for me to see the girl who used to fill my life with joy and glee sitting in a corner alone and shut off. I will not leave her side, but it’s difficult for me to see her this broken.

April 8th:

We had a breakthrough, a major one in fact. Her parents recently brought her a set of brushes for her to paint the things she sees outside the window. It was a nice notion, maybe she would find joy in this and the healing would begin.

The healing has definitely begun. I walked into the living room this morning to find her sitting on the stool painting once more, but she wasn’t painting something outside the window, in fact she never once looked up from her painting. She had begun painting a sunset and I thought nothing of it as I grabbed a cup of coffee.

I walked back over to look at the painting she had begun and… I’m not a clutz. In fact I have not tripped or dropped something in a while, but I’m pretty sure my jaw hit the floor before the mug of coffee did. Not only had she painted a sunset she had painted a stunning beach with a reef off to the side. A bench could be seen with a couple sitting together, the girls head laying peacefully on the boys. She had painted the beach where we had met, she had painted us.

April 8th:

It’s now been 2 years since the day she painted the beach. I wish I could say her memory had fully returned, it hasn’t. For the most part her memories are back, but from time to time she forgets who people are or how she first met them, but we are most definitely getting there.

This shall be my last entry, for tonight I take her hand in marriage once more. Four years ago we got married for the first time and as her memories come back she remembers those days in pieces. But she’s not the same person she was and neither am I. So we saw fit to do this again, we survived this, she survived this. Against all odds she survived that night and has been fighting ever since. I love her and she loves me, and maybe that's all that matters. Maybe you don’t need your past to write your future and that’s exactly what I intend to do. I Intend to write our future together, a future that began long before the beach, but changed forever in that single day on a wooden pier, full of paint and sand. That’s the day our love truly began.