I open my eyes. The moonlight shining upon the sea’s surface creates a bright pathway amidst the darkness, as if inviting me to follow. Below me the waves crash spiritedly upon the huge rocks, sending spumes of water up the face of the steep cliff. I look around me: no trees, no bushes, only a scattering of beach grass clinging to the edge.

I lean back my head and close my eyes.

Like a piece of flotsam from the wreck of my life, a vague image of Katherine floats before me. I quickly push it away. I picture my office desk and well-worn leather chair, but they quickly drift from view, too. Snapshots of my parents come into focus: father with his stern brow and strongly set jaw, although not wearing his black gown, looking as always like the all-powerful judge; mother, her slightly cloudy blue eyes and sweet but sad smile, masking some well-kept secret inside. Now they drift away with the other images.

No other face flashes before me except, curiously, that of a black Labrador I had from the time I was three to the age of seventeen. How I loved that creature, my closest companion, the explorations we went on in the woods near our home, the fishing in the bay in the spring and hunting in the fall.

Suddenly a great sadness comes over me. A deep longing wells up, from some forgotten place, for the land of my youth, for the beauty, solace and adventure I found there. Standing on this cliff, I’m transposed in time, walking with my dog in the woods. How strange it’s still there, almost intact: that humbling yet thrilling mystery and power of the woods and call to explore; that fully alive feeling on the edge of knowing and not knowing—heart pounding, eyes seeing everything everywhere, body both tense and relaxed, ready to receive as well as respond; and the intimation of an infinite otherness out there, yet simultaneously of it being in me, of animal, man and woods as one.

Looking down at the water now, I imagine a bridge linking this piece of land and time to that piece of my youth, and the water underneath the bridge all the time, faces and events between that moment long ago and this one right now, churning together, culminating in one crash upon the black rocks.

I close my eyes again as I listen to the wind and the waves. I hear their voices: the deep bass and underlying rhythm of the waves, and above it, the alto and riffing melody of the wind. They’re outside of me, but now I hear them inside. I try to decipher the lyrics of this song, yet hear no words. A kind of spiraling joy and plummeting sadness come over me all at once.

A picture takes shape in my mind: I see myself as a boy, bright and shining like a star, inside of a dark body that’s me as a grown man; and then I see that small bright boy grow larger, until he fills out to the dark periphery of the man, turning it into a yellow shimmering line.

I open my eyes. The moon is fading in the western sky and the sun is rising up out of the ocean.