Beach Day
“Rustic Beach” by Steve Zimmerman
My therapist tells me he sees a mathematician who doesn’t believe in time. I don’t tell my therapist I don’t either because I don’t want him to think that I think I am as smart as a mathematician, but I actually think that one thing (being a mathematician) has nothing to do with the other (“time=real?”) and that he already knows that I think I am both smart and not smart, and I do not want him to think I am obsessed with this, though by the fact of ever discussing it I am becoming obsessed with it, and this is probably why he brought it up, this hypothetical mathematician who doesn’t believe in time, and probably there is no such client and this is a test. Likely a test of if I will jump straight to agreeing with the mathematician by sheer fact of his job seeming to be, you know, maybe tragic mad genius, Beautiful Mind type, tortured by his visions of space-time continuums and such. Wandering alone murmuring to himself, “But time equals real or not equal real? Fucker!” And after tossing his smartwatch in the sea, and sitting exhausted in his tweedy blazer and spectacles onto the sand of the beach he’s been pacing, he accepts a telemedical video call from Therapist and exclaims, “Time, you know? Not sure about that!” And flips the image so Therapist can see the waves crashing, each wave cresting and dissolving before you can appreciate it was ever fully there, you know like human life and everything. “Its certainly a good thing you are a mathematician,” Therapist says. “Otherwise I would never take you seriously.”
Because if you run the math on that, what is time but this sludgy perception of the past and future? A wave you are sure was there but is not now, that you agree you both saw, but is gone, and if it was there, does it matter? That one wave? And the mathematician/me, gazing out, sand blowing at me sideways, each granule striking my skin roughly because I have tossed aside my itchy metaphorical blazer now to feel more the earth, the beach, to smell the air, to breathe in this moment I am sure I feel, this is real, I think, it must be – the entire world cannot just be inside my head and a construction of my mind and yet it is, it can only be. I get up now and march down to the water, which is cold in the off season at Rockaway Beach, which I like because my dog is now allowed here, running from the water, and I’m laughing at her suddenly. And deciding to forget time, I kick the water at her and pretend to race her and she races me. I calculate briefly what tragedy plus time equals , and conclude definitively that it is repressed memories. We run laughing down the shore away from those, which weren’t so bad anyway in the grand scheme of things, the grand scheme being useful for diluting the import of difficult feelings and the self, generally.
And for a moment there is nothing more than this. The churning in my mind begins to fade, like I have cut the transmission from a planet far away. Wind roars in my ear, and all previous less good feelings begin dissolving up there in my head like each crashing wave, which now gone I am not sure were ever there.
About the Author
Brigid Swanick is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She works in the film industry as a Grip, where she can be found carrying things back and forth all day.
about the artist
Steve Zimmerman’s story can be most favorably summarized as ‘quirky.’ Despite being raised in a family of teachers, he never enjoyed speaking in front of others. While attending school at Miami University in Oxford, OH, he double-majored in the money making fields of Anthropology and Creative Writing. Immediately following, he moved to Seattle and immersed himself in the world of retail while also pursuing some semblance of a career in photography. His work has appeared in venues such as the Morpho Gallery, Target Gallery, and the Tacoma Art Museum, as well as being published in the Bellingham Review, 3Elements Literary Review, and the Evansville Review, amongst others.