Beach Construction

Imagining something is just as effective as experiencing it. All the same neurons fire. I lie in bed, two years since I’ve been to the beach. The petty frictions of life have become too much and I can’t bring myself to physically travel there. I can’t stand the sweaty slog of the bus, the screaming crowds of people. Instead, I decide to create an ideal beach in my mind. As I sink into this vision, the sheets become the cool sand against my back. I get up and walk, dipping my toe into the sparkling ocean, the water just warm enough. A pleasantly non-burning sun shines down, and a light breeze whips my hair. I’m nude and the beach is totally private because this is my imagination, after all. Noticing this, half in and half out of my trance, I laugh. It’s so much better than my lived experience. No packed bus to get there, no used condoms or broken beer bottles hiding in the sand, no sneaky jellyfish in the water. No other people around to ruin it. My beach is sanitized. Perfect.

I start to travel there nightly. Friends occasionally invite me to hang out, but I make up excuses so I can keep visiting the beach. I don’t want to burst my own bubble by letting other people in. The control I have over my fantasy is the ultimate drug.

Eventually I choose to spend all my time there. I stop taking calls, stay in bed more often than not. I lose my job, but so what? I’m living at the beach, with none of the hassles that material reality entails. Lucky me!

When the Great Hurricane comes and decimates the actual beach, I don’t have to evacuate or bemoan the loss of property or erosion of the shoreline, or try to help sea creatures back into the water. Winds from the storm do reach our neighborhood, though. I hear them like a distant memory as I float on my back in the still sea. I ignore them. Then they knock down a large tree, which crashes through my bedroom window and kills me as I dream of the beach. I know this because I feel a slight shuddering in my body, a passing awareness that my tether to the external world is gone.

So this is where my spirit stays. It can get lonely, but then I just imagine a mermaid or a talking gull to keep me company. I can’t clearly picture my friends’ faces anymore. When I conjure them up they’re slightly skewed, composite sketches. At first I feel tight-throated sadness over this attempt to creep in, but then I just give them funny expressions to make myself laugh. I can’t picture the beach true to life, as I never got back there. The colors have gone psychedelic, the creatures alien, but that’s okay. It’s the way things are now, the way my brain has ultimately made them. Even though I’m no longer alive I construct my own reality, and it isn’t half bad.

As a performer and art model, Goldie Peacock spent over a decade bouncing between frenetic movement and absolute stillness before chilling out and becoming a writer. Their stories, essays, and poems appear or are forthcoming in HuffPost, Wild Roof Journal, Sundog Lit, (mac)ro(mic), Powders Press, Red Ogre Review, Fifth Wheel Press, MIDLVLMAG, MoonPark Review, Bullshit Lit, beestung, and DRAGS, a book showcasing NYC's drag superstars. They live in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY, USA), as well as online @goldiepeacock.

Published October 1 2022