Alone on the Beach in Kamakura

My mind often returns to August of last year, 
to that beach in Kamakura. I remember it was
mid-afternoon. I was sitting alone on the cold sand,
feeling time within me like an organ of my body, like a second heart, heated,
and fast. That entire day I had been alone,
on autopilot, but there, by the the ocean,
I found myself shifting
back into a realer, more organic state, and I thought
of my life, how it had developed into this foreign animal I knew to belong
to me, but did not recognize, nor control, a life powered
by something other than me, something
more innocent and magnetic, and free.

Life possesses its own momentum, I think,
a type of gravity generated by the soul. Like the survival instinct, but
more human, more mundane too; less about danger and more about
memory, and desire, and the muscular, spiritual pull in the body
that comes with the existence of beauty, the appearance of pain.
I don’t always feel it but when I do its effect is tidal, and immediate, like an electric current. I think of that instance, a few years ago,
in Washington D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Memorial airport,
waiting in a shuttle bus on the tarmac wet with rain, and pausing,
suddenly, to think: I’m living. I’m here, and I’m alive. It was a forceful,
and tender, and gently, momentarily paralyzing thought,
like passing by a garden for the millionth time and noticing,
for the very first time, the row of tiny flowers lining the path.

There’s a difficult, intractable, callous, evergreen
part of me that my mother often calls my “nature.”
I love, and require, this solidity but I wish I could change
the angle of it, give it substance instead of just density. I wish
I could carry resilience like a physical object.
I wish I could swing it like a sledgehammer.

I think a lot about my character, how it sees,
and reflects, and pursues the world. I think a lot
about possibility, and emotion, and owning up
to my bullshit. I think a lot about how for years I dejectedly
but willingly described myself as a neurotic girl, and then
a neurotic woman, just because my father called me that once.
I think a lot about what it means to judge, to separate, to reject,
to forgive, to value, to cherish, and how love
intersects with these, individually,
and in a sequence,
and all at once.

Where am I going with this? I don't know, but I am trying 
to be honest, and true, for once in my life and I think
I only know myself during those instances of peace,
when I am on my own, on the train, on a beach, those
instances which are close to my soul, which 

slow time down,

prolong my life for just a few more seconds, 

when the pretenses of calculation
— how to be, and say, and act, and to what degree —
which have so sustained my identity slip away,
and I am not afraid, for once, of excess, or hesitation.
I return to the beach at Kamakura, alone,
entirely responsible for my own life.
No need for excuses; no need for lies.

When I return home, I will go through my photographs of the trip.
The snapshots of white-petaled flowers with rosette cores,
the plain and dignified mountainside vistas,
the gray roads, their subtle, gold-toned luminosity in the summer evening.
I will go through images of the sea, its glassy stare.

I may find, perhaps, images my face too, a face
which some have called “heart-shaped,”
on those impulsive, rare instances that I turned
the camera around to capture my tired but smiling expression,
framed by iron and blue.