On Coming Home

My toes in the sand at Crystal Beach, which isn't very far from where I grew up. 

Published in the Orange-County Penny Record, January 8, 2014.  

I spent a lot of time at Crystal Beach growing up, especially as I got into high school.
I was bored with the attractions in Beaumont and restless. An hour's drive for free entertainment - sun and sand - seemed cheap. So my boyfriend and I would pack up a cooler and squeeze into our swimsuits and spend most of our weekends on the beach.
There were a lot of things I loved about those times. I loved driving on the sand in his new car. I loved getting sunbrowned and freckly. I liked getting pistolettes from the food truck by the fireworks sand.
And I loved the boyfriend. As much as a girl in high school can love a boyfriend, that is: with an intense, if variable, affection.
Saturday I returned for the first time in years, passing through on my way to a cruise that starts in Galveston. Though there are new beach cabins dotting the sands (and even a new grocery store, which, considering that I'd only ever seen the giant sandcastle-shaped one on the way to the ferry, seems like a major development), the beach itself is exactly how I remember it. There is nothing like returning to an unchanged place to find the ways you have grown.
So much has changed since then. For one thing, I wear sunscreen now, having lost the sunny invincibility I felt as a teenager in high school. The car was totaled in an accident that hurt no one. I broke up with the boyfriend towards the end of my freshman year in college. The things I thought I wanted then seem so small in comparison to my dreams now.
But though I've traveled far and wide enough that Crystal Beach is no longer the marvel that it once was, I keep coming back. Because Southeast Texas feels like home, and I love the beach.
But mostly because somewhere inside of me is still a suntanned sixteen-year-old, glowing with brash confidence, who sees a future as full of potential as the horizon is vast. She is bold. She feels like she'll never age, never worry about wrinkles and bills and kids' shoes grown too small. She doesn't stress her mortality. She has been buried beneath the sands of my very adult worries, but every now and then I unearth her for a peek. I feel most like her there on Crystal Beach.
That is a feeling worth coming back to, again and again.