Living on love, buying on time…
08/23/25
This was not his first time here. The salty winds, the cold afternoon-evening breeze, were a familiar companion for Arthur. He’s a regular visitor at this beach, having seen hundreds, if not thousands, of sunsets over this horizon.
To him, each day, each sunset, each sit-down on the coarse sand of the Gulf of whatever carries a unique story; but a familiar memory.
The day I took this photo, though, the sky above was virtually a monochrome painting; the soft feathery clouds, the bulging horizon, the calm ocean waves, and the relatively low tides, all mirroring the vastness of his own thoughts.
His fingers, gnarled with the stories of over seventy years on this earth, were busy on the screen with his four- maybe five-year-old iPhone. It wasn’t a frantic, random, dopamine-search scroll through TikTok or an urgent reply to his [at]yahoo, or maybe [at]hotmail email. Nope, He was engaged in a different, perhaps painful, kind of digital archeology. He was scrolling through his old photos in the Photos app. Memory, memory is a strange archivist.
He’d found a trove from his young days, faces long gone. Smiles he no longer sees at his doorsteps. There was Margaret, Maggie, his late wife of 40 years, her warm laughter almost audible through the grainy pixels of a film-shot beach picnic photo from the 80s in Santorini. Her left hand, decorated with a “VIP pass bracelet”, was reaching for a sandwich. Next to her on the right was Arthur. He paused on that, smiled, and had a subtle head shake.
There were also pictures of his kids, their heads sticky with ice cream, building sandcastles on the shore, with him and Maggie in the background. Now, they are all adults, with their own children, lives, and jobs, far away from him. He wasn't sad seeing the pictures, not truly. It was more a poignant acceptance of time’s indifference to life; time’s indifference to happiness, time’s indifference to love. An acceptance of the fact that even the loudest of us will one day speak no more. Each photo was a reminder of joy, of challenges, of a life well-lived.
He looked up for a moment, past the edge of his phone, and noticed I was quietly and curiously staring at him. He gave me a warm smile when we locked eyes and said, “Great evening out here, eeh!”. I took that as an invitation to his world. I approached and had a solid 20 or so minutes where we talked about everything. As I was leaving the beach at nearly sunset, the horizon was still there, the promise of tomorrow still held within its depths; the promise of yet another day to live on love.
To Arthur, the past is a beautiful place to check in, but the present holds its own precious moments even in its disturbing solitude and dreams. To him, the next best thing to do, second only to perusing through his old photos, is to sit back and enjoy the glow of the setting sun.
[shot on Google Pixel 9 Pro Xl, 08|23|2025]
