The gazebo is at the far end of the beach, near the smooth stillness of the sound and the quiet slap of sea against jetty, and where my young adulthood ebbed and flowed.

I stumbled upon it my first semester at college. Here my friends and I would watch thesunrise and believe, for an irrecoverable   instant, in the eternal. Later, on those depressive nights when the sun had set, I stared alone at the black night, the rain cocooning me, the stars muffled by the sky’s foggy thoughts. 

I took a clandestine cigarette puff beneath the gazebo’s shade in a dizzying, dreamlike heat. 

I followed a beautiful silhouette behind a nearby dune. On certain cold nights I can still feel the scrape of wood chips down my spine.

My cousin, not more than three, placed a finger to his lips as we tip-toed toward a colony of seagulls.

Bodies emerged laughing from midnight waters on Britton’s twenty-third birthday. I waded alone as they strode away, naked beneath the moonlight.

Finally, the octogenarians stumbled upon me as I leaked my pulped heart onto a spiral notebook. Just married and, like me, wanting to enjoy this singular space, a sea viewed from beneath the gazebo. They wished me to be the next Shakespeare, and I took their picture with a school-bus-yellow disposable camera--I can still see them smiling, robust, ethereal in the sun.

Over two decades ago, and yet I hold onto the delusion that this ancient couple will stand beneath the gazebo this summer and reminisce about our encounter.

But the stars don’t look so lonely now, when I come to breathe the past. This makes me rethink my delusion. Maybe the newlyweds are keeping them company, along with some of my friends, a grand gathering of all those who are no longer anchored to this world, who have no further need for symbols with which to tether the past.

Adam Cheshire is a  writer and bookseller living in Hillsborough, NC. His work has appeared  in multiple literary journals. His novella Flesh and Ghost was  published by The Write Launch, and a flash prose collection, 90s Kid  Plays Games, was published by NiftyLit.