My Island

I sighed deeply, letting the sound of my state of bliss harmonize with the music of the crashing waves. My brown, yet highlighted bangs squirmed slightly on my tanned forehead, as a tropical breeze tickled them on its way across the shore of my moonlit beach. I lay back, letting my head rest against the silky smooth sand. I then raised my fist and sprinkled some into the salty air, watching each grain fly away like shooting stars against the sky. The reflection of the pale moonlight on the water was beautiful. It shimmered and waved with the ripples of the water, lulling me almost to sleep. I was alone, yet perfectly content. Everything was perfect.

          I was still a child inside, only living the life of a 34 year old man. My clothes consisted of Hawaiian shirts and cut off kakis. Each night I would lie on the beach of Rose Island, just counting the stars and letting the breeze caress my bare chest. This was the life I had chosen, away from the world I once knew. Even if I did live in a shack…it was still the Bahamas.

          My thoughts drifted back to the life I used to know. I chuckled at myself, remembering my hopes and dreams of someday making something incredibly rich and famous of myself. I sighed, that’s not what I needed at all. My memory began to recall high school, and the many stresses I had as an adolescent. I had written music…more than 40 songs by the time I was 15. They were all autobiographical, somehow weaving together the story of my life. How could I have been so stupid; believing that someday people would want to buy them?  

I remembered my friends; the huge clan of them. Somehow, time had managed to change most of them. They had been sculpted into adult figures, but I wouldn’t grow up. After a while, a lot of them really didn’t care what I had to say anyways. I was always listening to all of their stories of adventures they went and had without me. Barely any of them ever had time to listen to what I had to say, or even spare me a passing glance…so that was that.  There was only one particular and small group of kids though, that stuck by my throughout everything. I still kept in touch with a few of them through e-mail, and sometimes visited the United States for one of our traditional sleepovers. (As I mentioned, I’m still a child inside.) 

I blinked and my dream faded into my reality; which in some aspect could be confused with one. Singing softly, I began to serenade the stars with a new song I had been writing. They would be the only ones to hear it, but I didn’t mind. They were quite a good audience. Somehow they never got tired of listening to me.

I gazed up through the heavens above me, to a place where God looks down upon me. With gratitude for my peaceful existence, I thanked him for letting everything turn out ok in the end.  I thanked him for changing my thoughts of ending it all in a final desperate way of escaping life…because in a way, I did. I now lived in the Bahamas in peace; alone with myself and my piano that I kept in the far right corner of my “house.” During the day time, I would sit out along the beach of Nassau with my balloon stand and sell balloons for 30 cents each. It wasn’t much, but it added up and paid enough to live. Finally I had the time to sit and daydream; something I could never do when I lived amongst the busyness of everyone else’s lives. No one could ever just stop and realize that there’s more to life than keeping a scheduled routine. There is a beauty out there that only some are able to grasp, and you can only see it when traveling slow enough. I didn’t live in the lap of material luxury, but I had all the happiness I would ever need in life.

I smiled and watched each wave lap up at my footsteps that I had taken to get to this spot on the beach. Each wave erased a different troubled time of mine that was engraved so slightly into the sand. My attention was caught by another soothing breeze that lifted my soul into the air, whispering into my ear and ridding my memory of soot. Once again, I looked back at the shore, but suddenly my footsteps were gone.