The Quiet Life

Summertime on the coast is almost everything I imagined it would be. I've been shopping for bikes painted in ice cream colors, eyeing women on the street who dress as deliciously as they do on my inspiration boards (feet colorful and patent-heeled, eyelids dewey and glitter-swiped), listening to music so wistfully nostalgic that it recalls a life nothing like my own, taking sunset walks through my enthusiastically blooming neighborhood, and picking some of the stems for the lonely vase on my coffee table. 

It was so wonderful to have a visitor in my tiny place, if just for an evening. We watched an episode of True Life about sugar mamas and ate pizza while sitting cross legged on the carpet. He looked through my postcards while Julian Casablancas crooned in the background and I lit my Jesus candles. Just as swiftly, those precious hours passed and I was back to my early morning treks to work and he went back to sleep in a marvelous house perched next to the sea. 

It's hard to get your bearings after such an emotionally charged weekend. We drove across the state lines so that I could tie the sash on my second bridesmaid dress and watch one of my dearest soul sisters marry her beloved. Musicians played late into the night and the string lights were refracted through my constantly teary lenses. Sublime. 

Midnight Afflictions

"What compelled me to move to England in the first place? A more self-possessed person might have explored this question before she brown-boxed the contents of her apartment in Manhattan. Before she sublet the only home she knew in exchange for a rented room that grew dank at night when the garden snails slipped inside to consort beneath her bed.

At twenty-seven, I was not that person. The facts of my life still seemed largely beyond my control. I felt steered (or rather, flung) through the world not by intention or foresight, but by some uncontrollable force (my own subconscious, which I knew as "fate"). The question--Why did I move to England?--hits me only in hindsight, as I sit heartbroken on a homeward-bound plane.

The short answer is easy: I moved to Brighton for love, or at least the possibility of it."

-Koren Zailckas

I have always been a firm believer (foolish, I am) in the fate of certain books falling into my hands at the exact moment I need them to. Fury appeals remarkably to my bleeding heart.

Sans.

Tonight I kept my distance from the throngs of people headed to the west beach, arm in arm, wrapped in and clutching spangled banners. Even though I ache for that sort of dumb companionship, I avoid it. Despite my usual haunt being closed, I parked in the nearest neighborhood and tiptoed through the trees and into the sand. New sounds take place at night; thousands of frogs, the sweet rustling of trees, silverware clinking through yellow-lit windows of cliff homes, and the boom, crack, sizzle of far-away luminaries. After a few minutes passed, I watched in silence as a tiny firework show from miles away took place close to the horizon. It's spectacular to see something so grand be minimized by the vastness of the ocean and sky, blending seamlessly at the horizon. I could've pinched it's grandeur between my index finger and thumb.