The Cove That Held Me

Some places you don't find—you claim.

I was twelve when I claimed Pirate's Cove, Corona del Mar, California. A narrow inlet carved by time and tide, hidden between jagged cliffs and the restless Pacific.

Today it's tamed—concrete steps with iron rails guiding the descent, the rocks worn from too many feet, beach towels, bold and bright, strewn like markers across the once-empty sand.

But back then, the Cove was raw, sheltering, alive. A place the wind couldn't find. A place a child like me—lean, angry, light on her feet—could disappear into without anyone asking where she'd gone.

That summer, my family folded in on itself. Divorce papers. Packed boxes. Shouting that left holes in the walls and in us.

After we lost the house, we moved into a rented bungalow a few blocks from the beach—two bedrooms, two families. My mother’s friend lived there with her three kids, and somehow we all fit, though just barely.

Sleeping was a nightly shuffle. My older brothers sprawled where they could. I drifted from room to room, always looking for a quiet patch of floor. A corner without voices.

My father's daughter. My mother's competition. Even then, I didn’t understand this.

My father wasn't gone, not really—just living in his small one-bedroom apartment on the other side of the distant jetty on the Balboa Peninsula. Close enough to visit. Far enough to be absent.

My mother worked nights at the Five Crowns Restaurant, several blocks from the bungalow. She often didn’t come home until the early hours before dawn. When she did, it was with the dazed look of someone who had traveled through fog. Her cigarette smoke arrived before she did, trailing behind her like a ghost of the night she'd survived. Gin on her breath. Eyes that didn’t quite land. She filled the house without speaking.

One morning, I woke to my youngest brother crawling into the blanket beside me. He didn’t say much—he rarely did when he was scared—just pressed his body close and waited for me to make things feel safe.

I laid there for a while, stiff, watching the ceiling turn from gray to gold. Then I slipped out from under the blanket, careful not to wake him.

Some mornings, the pressure of being sister, mother, protector—it sat too heavy. I needed to walk. I needed to breathe the cool, crisp salt air and not be needed.

I learned to slip away early, before the sidewalks baked and the first cool gusts from the ocean threaded through the heat.

The eucalyptus trees stood sentinel along my route. Their silver-dollar leaves released medicine when crushed underfoot. Bougainvillea spilled over fences in impossible fuchsia and orange, a violence of color against whitewashed walls. At each corner, the salt air grew stronger. Ocean and earth meeting in the nostrils, a clean beginning.

I walked along Goldenrod Avenue, past the little bungalows stitched with the quiet hum of families waking.

Windows thrown open to catch the salt air. Children's faces blinking at me from behind screens, some waving with the easy joy of kids who knew they were home.

I smiled sometimes, but I never stopped.

That kind of belonging wasn’t mine to touch. Maybe it never had been.

At the bluff's edge, I'd wait.

The morning light bounced off the water, bright enough to make my eyes ache.

I stood still, listening.

The descent required privacy. My refuge couldn’t be shared without becoming something else entirely.

If the Cove was empty—no strangers, no footprints in the sand—I'd pick my way down the rock face, fast where I could, clinging where I had to.

My fingers learned the secrets of the sandstone—which handholds would break away, which would hold firm. Small rocks skittered down ahead of me, announcing my arrival to the waves.

Scrapes didn't scare me. A fall didn't scare me. But the idea of being seen—really seen—made my stomach twist.

Inside the Cove, the world softened. The cliffs cupped the air in a hush. The ocean exhaled slow, heavy breaths, as if tired of holding up the sky.

Time dissolved here, minutes stretching into hours or collapsing into moments so brief they passed like breath—gone before I could name them.

The quality of silence—not an absence but a presence, something you could almost touch, like the cool shadow cast by the cliff or the salt drying on skin.

I'd sit with my knees drawn to my chest and let the warmth and strength of the rocks steady me.

Staring out at the horizon until the sailboats blurred into smudges and the sky melted from blue to violet to black.

Dreaming of another life—a life with windows thrown open to the sea, a life where loneliness wasn't something you wore like a second skin.

Some days, I traced blueprints into the sand—houses built of wide windows and salt air, rooms filled with music and laughter, a door that never slammed shut.

Not the glass house my mother pointed to sometimes, the one perched precariously on the cliffside with its elevator and its polished spine.

"That one," she would say, nodding toward it, her cigarette hand arcing smoke into the air. "A big producer lives there. I waited on him once. Very important."

Her voice would soften, as if she could already hear the applause she imagined for him—and maybe, by extension, for herself.

I must have believed her. I must have pointed out that same house to the other kids who sometimes wandered down to the Cove with me—laughing, climbing, chasing shadows across the sand, carrying the weight of stories we hadn’t yet learned how to tell.

Once, a boy around my age scrambled down the rocks while I was already tucked into the shadowed curve of the cliff.

He shouted into the wind, kicked sand at the tide, and left a trail of Snickers candy bar wrappers behind him.

I stayed still, my arms loose around my knees, watching him with the sharp annoyance of someone whose secret place had been invaded.

He didn’t know this Cove wasn’t just a beach.

When he finally left, I stood where he had stood, pressing my palms into the sand, as if claiming it back.

On good days, the Cove felt mine alone.

But little by little, the edges frayed.

More footprints on the sand. More voices drifting down from the bluff.

The ocean kept its own counsel.

The sun still warmed the rocks until they felt alive beneath my touch.

But the stillness wasn’t as deep anymore. The hush wasn’t as pure.

Even then, I knew: the world was coming.

On those days, I could still believe in permanence, in shelter, in the possibility of belonging somewhere, to something.

Even at twelve, I understood: nothing stays untouched forever.

One day, I hurled rocks into the surf until my shoulder throbbed and my breath came in stabs. I wasn’t aiming. There was nothing to hit.

I sat down hard, arms limp at my sides, heart racing against the stillness.

The cliffs didn’t flinch. The tide didn’t care.

But something in me shifted. Not like a door swinging open—more like a knot loosening.

I wouldn’t be rescued. That much was clear.

If I wanted safety, I’d have to build it somewhere inside myself.

Pirate's Cove is smaller now—paved, polished, folded into weekend plans and tourist brochures. The wildness I found there, the shelter, the wide open quiet—it's gone.

But somewhere deeper than memory, it still breathes.

Years later, I returned with my mother's ashes. She had asked to be scattered here, in the place she once pointed to from the cliffs. The glass house still clung to the rocks, polished and invincible. The Cove was quieter now—tamed, civilized—but it cradled the tide just the same.

I said goodbye to her, to the child I was, to the life she once believed could save us.

Even now, when life unspools or fractures—when something breaks and there's no clear way to fix it—I pause. I breathe. I remember: Pirate’s Cove taught me how to stay. Not how to be fearless, but how to be still. How to listen. How to stay with myself long enough to remember I could move forward anyway.

When the world feels too sharp, I close my eyes and feel the hush of the cliffs at my back, the salt on my tongue, the slow beat of the horizon waiting for me.

I was twelve when I first believed in another life.

I still do.