today i remembered that if you take me to a beach in winter i am happy; i become a four-year-old child again and i wander and play and jump on things and if you do not catch me i will fly.
today was about the wind in my hair and the cold on my face, sand giving under my boots and a heart full of light.
today was about Normandy and the war, soldiers climbing through surf over other soldiers' bodies, the french burying germany's dead with full honors, hiding out in cramped bunkers waiting to die.
there is a thrill that comes with your boots in the mud in those bunkers, a closeness of time and space in which your reality is not so far off from theirs, if you could just get through. the same wind whips through your hair and you see the same water ahead, the same sky. if you squint just right and allow your heart to slide a bit to the left you can see thousands of ships approaching, just over the skyline, bringing both freedom and the tremors of death. mass chaos and fear.
but today was about more than that. it was about the layering of histories, of time and space. the shimmer of my golden moments overlaying the horror of the past, bringing it into vast relief, accentuating and defining. you cannot have one without the other and you cannot understand one without the other. a solemn, mournful day would do no justice to what happened there, and a heart full of light on any other beach would be no more than what it was. it's the juxtaposition that makes it true, and i feel more deeply and complexly of joy and of yearning and empathy and horror and fear and vertigo than i have ever felt. i feel older. i comprehend. i am in awe.
i am at peace and content today. joyful. joyeux noel at last.
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